There are no colorful characters in "Gomorrah," Matteo Garrone's corrosive and ferociously unsentimental fictional look at Italian organized crime; no white-haired mamas lovingly stirring the spaghetti sauce; no opera arias swelling on the soundtrack; no homilies about family, honor or tradition; no dark jokes; no catchy pop songs; no film allusions; no winking fun; no thrilling violence.
Instead, there is waste, grotesque human waste, some of which ends up illegally buried in the same ground where trees now bear bad fruit, some of which, like the teenager scooped up by a bulldozer on a desolate beach, is cast away like trash.
A snapshot of hell, the film takes its biblically inflected punning title from the Camorra, or Neapolitan Mafia, the largest of Italy's crime gangs, with 100 barely organized, incessantly warring clans and some 7,000 members. Based in and around Naples, the Camorra (it means gang) smuggles cigarettes, drugs, guns and people, polluting the province with fear and worse. Unlike the better-known Sicilian Mafia, the Camorra has never had a significant presence in this country, pop cultural or otherwise.
People are also reading…
The sense that you are visiting an alien world is critical to the film's forceful grip, which immediately takes hold of you in the opening with images of some men bathed in dark blue light standing in what turn out to be sunbathing booths. The men initially look like space travelers, an idea that vanishes when sudden gunfire erupts. You never learn who the men are or why they died. What matters is that this is a world in which people kill other human beings as casually as you take out the garbage.
Among the most imperiled are two teenage dimwits (Marco Macor and Ciro Petrone) who run amok while shouting lines from Brian De Palma's "Scarface" and a delicate-faced 13-year-old (Salvatore Abruzzese) who joins the Camorra without realizing the price it will exact. Interwoven with these separate story threads are three others.
The film was adapted from the 2006 best-selling exposé of the same title by the Italian journalist Roberto Saviano, who grew up right outside of Naples.
I don't want to overplay the film's violence — it has a lower body count than the average Hollywood action flick. But part of what's bracing about "Gomorrah" is both its deadly serious take on violence and its global understanding of how far and wide the mob's tentacles reach, from high fashion to the very dirt.
Gomorrah
***1/2
• Rated: Not rated.
• Cast: Salvatore Abruzzese, Simone Sacchettino.
• Director: Matteo Garrone.
• Family call: Not for kids.
• Et cetera: In Italian, Mandarin and French with subtitles.
• Running time: 137 minutes.
