Gomorra

In Gennaro's Gomorra, the money dispensed by the gangsters is dog-eared, ratty, stained, dirty-looking. There is nothing glamorous about a life of crime in Sicily's government subsidized tenement housing -- the senior killers conduct their "hits" in what look like ragged boxer shorts and soccer team tee-shirts. There are no gorgeous dames, no nice cars, no amenities at all -- the senior gangsters just get to live a little longer than their peers. Martin Scorsese presents the film to the American public and, suitably enough, the picture is a white-hot melange of huge close-ups, rotting industrial landscapes, and jerky hand-held camera-work following characters as they wriggle through the teeming, wrecked pyramid of the government housing where everyone seems to live. Scorsese's operatic sensibility is nowhere evident in Gennaro's film which seems more indebted to the dismal proletarian tableaux of the Dardennes' brothers. The music is always on someone's radio or car stereo. Nothing is stylized although some of the deaths do occur in suitably melodramatic neo-noir settings -- a graveyard of religious statuary, an eerie blue-lit tanning spa, a forlorn beach that seems so grey as to be almost devoid of any light at all. The movie narrates five stories, none of which interlock, and so the structure of the picture is chaotic and, frequently, confusing -- the film exists at about the limit of complexity that an audience can grasp and Gennaro's either intentionally, or by reason of incompetence, doesn't provide a lot of clues as to which story the picture is currently developing: the audience does a lot of guess-work, not all of it productive -- for instance, the showy massacre at the beginnng of the picture is unmotivated and can't be deciphered in terms of anything that follows -- at least upon one viewing the film. We don't get any exposition and the tendency to proceed in huge close-ups makes it often impossible to tell where action is taking place. There is a crumbling, massive tenement building -- something like the deformed, ruinous, tenement that Fellini populated with grotesques in his Satyricon; it looks like something out of Bladerunner with crowded aerial walkways and burst water-lines spraying mist down into abysmal subterranean parking garages. Other places seem rural. The two boys who imitate Tony Montana in Brian dePalma's Scarface stumble through the filthy muck of some kind of cattle feed lot and there are dismal waste lots in the country filled with garbage and debris. A huge quarry serves as a repository for toxic waste illegally dumped by cheerful crowds of eight-year old boys driving huge trucks -- the real drivers won't handle the toxic barrels when one of them bursts and maims a worker. There is a muddy beach that smells of dead fish where the two boys in their underpants shoot automatic weapons across a lagoon -- no one seems to be around. Two of the five stories end with older characters making escapes after everyone around them has been killed -- one of the men has the tip of his nose shot off. A little boy who delivers groceries in the tenement is drawn into a war of assasinations and counter-assasinations, the two kids with thes automatic weapons are rubbed-out, another young man walks away from the criminal enterprise with his boss shouting at him that he can "go and make pizzas for a living." The whole thing is disheartening and not particularly illuminating and Gennaro's crime picture is quick to deny the audience the pleasures of a standard gangster film -- that is, the lure of power, money and sex. None of these incentives is visible in Gennaro's despoiled landscape. This is a work of anthropology and not really a narrative gangster film (there is no rise and fall trajectory) -- the picture works best when it is pure anthropology: that is an analytical view of the tenement with the children swimming in a spool on a terrace, the women doing laundry and hanging it from balconies, and the hoodlum lookouts on the roof watching for the carabineri.