Gomorra

Grueling neo-realist Italian cinema from Roberto Saviano's best selling book, (incidently regarded as a literary masterpiece in undercover journalism) it’s about the power and reach of the mob in Naples called, the camorra.  It's hard to think that this whole area of southern Italy is riddled with fear and despair.

The action is set in and around the tenement buildings of Scampia in Naples involving groups of characters in various stages as they move up through the food chain. The mob is split by turf wars. No police officers or other authority figures take any sort of effective or preventative action, the church is utterly absent. The urban wars divide loyalties, creates ruptures and fissions that discharge all the other individual stories as if rubbish. The action revolves around two teenagers obsessed with Brian de Palma’s film Scarface and with becoming mob bosses themselves. They get lucky with a cocaine deal, they become brash, drawing attention to themselves with flashy behaviour. There’s also a harassed bean counter employed by the camorra to patrol the grim estates doling out money to pacify the pensioners, widowers, and elderly to keep them quite. There’s a nasty businessman who offers dumping grounds for toxic waste, importing carcinogens from all over the EU, falsifying documents. The cancer rates soar, gangster’s get rich, get high and get shot in the head. There’s no real central mob boss who we can follow in the film and to become fascinated with, there’s just grisly gangs, scattered villains and victims filmed with loose, free-wheeling energy and attack and all this undermining the whole of the south of Italy.