Gomorrah

Rating: * * * * *

Verdict

:

Grim, violent, mesmerising masterpiece

An unsentimental, angry, shockingly violent and a bona fide masterpiece, this is a fictional examination of the Neapolitan mafia, every frame of which has a unmistakable ring of truth. That's partly because it is based on the 2006 expose of the same title by Roberto Saviano (the Italian journalist, who was under army protection for two years and now lives abroad in hiding, was one of the screenplay's six writers). But it's also down to director Garrone's unflinching control of his material.

The romantic sheen of the

Godfather

movies; the pre-Tarantino psychopathic jokiness of

Goodfellas

; the epic tone of

Once Upon a Time in America

; all are missing here. In this film, life is cheap and death arrives without fanfare. There are no balletic slo-mo massacres with artistic sprays of blood. Bodies, scooped up by a bulldozer, are disposed of as casually as toxic waste and killers don't go home and kiss Mamma before she serves lunch.

The film's title is a grim pun on Camorra, the Italian name of the organisation that runs life in Naples and surrounding Campania: Gomorrah was one of the cities in Genesis mired in sin and destroyed by God with the original fire and brimstone.

God keeps a pretty low profile, though, in the world this film evokes and the destruction is all man-made. It's a vision of hell, which Garrone distills into five partly intersecting stories. Don Ciro (Imparato), is a mob bag man who delivers money to the families of gangsters in prison; the barely pubescent Toto (Abruzzese) hungers to be one of the mob; the naive

Scarface

-quoting Ciro (Petrone) and Marco (Macor) fancy that they already are. We know as soon as we meet them that they won't make old bones.

Meanwhile, a camorrista named Franco (Servillo) presides over a toxic waste dump - a bleakly neat metaphor for the literal poisoning of the earth on which they work; and fashion designer Pasquale (Cantalupo) wonders whether to break free of Camorra control.

What's most effective about Garrone's approach is his chilling detachment. He concocts fantastic set pieces - the opening sequence in a tanning salon is a heartstopper and the last scene a heartbreaker - but he never seems to be striving for effect and there is not one melodramatic moment, as much as we might long for one to offer some kind of release. The director's approach is that of an observer, less a documentarian than a zoologist, watching animals obey the law of the wild.

Peter Calder

Cast

: Marco Macor, Ciro Petrone, Salvatore Abruzzese, Toni Servillo, Carmine Paternoster, Gianfelice Imparato, Maria Nazionale, Salvatore Cantalupo

Director

: Matteo Garrone

Running time

: 135 mins

Rating

: R16 (violence, offensive language, drug use) In Italian with English subtitles