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MILAN - GO SEE THE GOMORRAH MOVIE

A few issues back we interviewed Neapolitan author Roberto Saviano about his book Gomorrah, a brutal, half-fictional exposé of the Naples mafia—aka the Camorra, the most powerful criminal organization in Italy. The book has sold nearly five million copies to date, been translated into 42 languages, and turned its author into target numero uno for mafia assassination. Making matters even worse for Saviano, Gomorrah was recently adapted into a movie by Italian director Matteo Garrone, and making matters even worse than that, said movie is completely great. Better than the book, easily.

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The film has been racking up awards and critical acclaim (it took the Grand Prix at this year's Cannes) ever since it opened in Italy this spring. Now as it makes its way to theaters outside the country, a camorrista turned government witness has said there are plans to kill Saviano before the end of the year. We're not saying we want to see Saviano dead or anything, but he could have picked a far worse movie to go to the chopping block for. Hell, I almost wouldn't mind dying for this myself, and I HATE dying.

It's kind of hard to criticize a book that leads its author into 24-hour protective custody and a potential death sentence. But Saviano chose to put himself at the center of the book version of Gomorrah. He visits the illegal toxic waste dumps; he goes to Scamp— the largest open-air drug market in the world, to see the new batches of cheap heroin being tried out on live subjects. The end result is a messy hybrid of immersive journalism and contemporary crime fiction. Messy in that, unlike works like the book's stated model In Cold Blood,  the line between what is and isn't factual is completely indiscernible. There were no footnotes, no sources, no direct quotations in the first dozen or so print runs, and they only appeared in the second edition. Rather than force you to suspend your disbelief though, the book's structure totally reinforces it, constantly making you question which parts are actually real and not.

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The book is also extremely subjective and extremely angry, at times coming across more like a 500-page rant about the Camorra than a mostly-factual account of them. Anyways, all these problems are totally forgivable considering that it's only thanks to this book that the world is now aware of how incredibly fucked up Naples is. Before it came out nobody here knew the names of any of the fuckers in the Camorra, and now the Italian news opens with them, as it should.

Garrone's adaptation, however, avoids all the thorny issues with fact and fiction by scrapping the journalistic pretense and eliminating Saviano from the narrative entirely. Weirdly, what remains on screen feels even truer to life than the definitely-true parts of the book.

The movie tells five intertwined stories taken from the book. One follows an entrepreneur from the Camorra and his apprentice as they make deals to provide the land for illegal toxic waste dumps, the second  tells the story of a mafia tailor who makes contraband haute couture and who starts teaching fashion design to a rival clan of chinese immigrants, another follows two teenagers who set up a gang of two and start robbing and dealing drugs in Naples, and the final two focus on the mafia war in the ever popular Scampia—the first from the perspective of a 12-year-old who desperately wants to join a family at the war's outset; the second from the point of view of a middle-aged mafia bagman who tries not to get involved.

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If you're worried about putting up with a bunch of teens and grown men rehash every line from this movie over and over a la every other crime movie ever made, relax. You can't see this film and act tough. All five of the stories are fucking tearjerkers, and not because Garrone is serving the audience the usual Hollywood bullshit. The film has no glamor, no maudlin music score, and the camera follows everyone with the same cold, clear-headed eye. None of the gloom that it wallows in is artificial. Most of the actors are non-professionals Garrone picked off the street (two of them were actually just arrested for mafia involvement, no shit), all of whom speak such incomprehensibly tight Neapolitan dialect that the movie was screened with subtitles even for the Italian market. It might not be quite as ambitious as Saviano's book, but when it hits you, it really nails you right in the gut. Like Mike Leigh's best films, once you've gotten into it you barely feel the presence of the director or the camera or even the notion of a script.

All of which is not to say that the movie is not enjoyable to watch. Throughout the gloom and the brutality, the cinematography is so gorgeous that half of the stills from the film are better than most pictures I've seen of crime in Naples. A wedding procession passing through the projects where camorristas are hawking heroin ends up looking like an animated Renaissance painting. And the scene from the trailer where the two kids, stripped to their underwear in a marsh, try out their weapons while screaming lines from Scarface feels like it was shot on a different planet. Don't even get me started on the shot of the kids playing in the above-ground pool that pulls back to reveal them on the roof of the projects while the mafia lookouts shout their warnings to each other below.

You should do whatever it takes to see what they made of Saviano's masterwork when it comes near you, even if it kills him.

TIM SMALL

Gomorrah is playing at a bunch of places in the UK right now. Go here for a list of theaters. It was also screened a few weeks ago at the New York Film Festival, and hopefully will be coming back some time soon. Keep your eyes peeled.