Considering that Martin Scorcese is the presenter of the new Italian crime drama Gomorrah, which opens this weekend, you might expect the film to contain echoes of Goodfellas. But while a couple of the young thugs in the story take their cues from Scarface and other gangster films, the American films Gomorrah resembles are sprawling multi-story issues-based epics like Traffic and Syriana, which attempt to elucidate social ills by unraveling their various threads. Unlike those films, however, Gomorrah features a mostly nonprofessional cast and has a harsh documentary quality, recalling the Italian neorealist classics made after World War II. Beginning with an opening scene depicting a series of point-blank murders under the eerie blue glow of a tanning salon, Gomorrah explores the way that the rampant criminality of Mob-controlled Naples makes daily life surreal: Junkies beg for doses in enormous concrete housing blocs that feel like a Corbusian nightmare, small boys drive giant freight trucks through a quarry used for illegal dumping, a Mercedes crashes through the headstones of a cemetery.

Adapted from Roberto Saviano’s best-selling nonfiction book of the same title about the clandestine world of the Neopolitan mafia (which proved so incendiary that the Italian government was obligated to grant the author around-the-clock police protection), the film demonstrates the extent to which the mafia runs the show in Naples (and the rest of the country beyond it), trafficking not only in drugs and guns, but also dipping into haute couture and Tony Soprano’s specialty, waste management, while exerting a vise-like grip on the psyche of regular people just trying to go about their lives. Though visceral and jarring, Gomorrah doesn’t have the same kind of emotional impact as neorealist predecessors by the likes of Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio de Sica; instead, it has the quality of a testimonial, evidence entered in the court of public opinion attesting to the toxic effects of corruption in Italy. The film’s final surreal tableau, showing a tractor driving over sand dunes toward the horizon, its shovel raised high with the bodies of two young unfortunates hidden inside, makes the point abundantly clear. In the heartless world of Gomorrah, human beings are reduced to refuse, destined for the same end as the rest of our trash—to be buried underground.

KEYWORDS: crime, film, Italy

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