Matteo Garrone's Gomorra: Searching for a New Film Language
By Paola Casella

Ciro and Marco (Ciro Petrone and Marco Macor) play gangsters in Gomorra's no man's land

The real novelty of Gomorra, Matteo Garrone's winner of the Grand Prize at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, is that it treats its subject – Camorra, the Neapolitan brand of Mafia – in the most unglamorous way ever seen on film, and that it does so by creating a new, un-cinematic language.

Gomorra is based on the homonymous bestseller by Roberto Saviano, describing in detail the criminal structure of Camorra.  The book was a longwinded exposé, recounting several different episodes only slightly fictionalized and loosely interconnected by Saviano, a newspaper reporter formerly residing in Naples and currently living in nameless locations under police protection.

Making a similar artistic choice, Matteo Garrone's Gomorra subverts the idea that a "mafia movie" has to have a cohesive narrative structure: rather than telling a story, or even a series of stories, the film chooses not to have a clear plot, going against most movie conventions pertaining to organized crime stories, which are usually told onscreen through a family of main characters and show, through an escalation of action scenes, an unstoppable rise to criminal success and a subsequent endless descent into hell.  Sure, things happen in Gomorra, but they do so in a random sequence, making the point that life, for the people who live in the rundown and deeply alienating projects of Scampia, the area of Naples where the movie is almost entirely set (a set like a prison, which Scampia is, for most of its residents, including those not affiliated with Camorra), is a series of casual events over which the characters have virtually no control.

That is why Gomorra's plot cannot really be described as a collection of episodes. The segments never connect in a single coherent structure, each having a beginning, a middle and an end. Even when the fragments of the "plot" intersect, they do so in an apparently casual manner, refusing to let viewers capitalize on the information that they have thus far received about the characters and activities in each "episode."

Gomorra doesn't have one single protagonist, or even a series of main characters: each actor walks into the frame as if by accident (again, a metaphor of the "accidental lives" of Scampia's residents) and often slips out ot it abruptly, indicating that no human existence in the film (as in the Naples controlled by Camorra) is of any relevance, and by extension, no human life is of any consequence or meaning in a place of chaos and madness (as suggested by the title itself, which turns the word "Camorra" into the biblical place symbolizing total loss of decency and of moral order).

It is telling, in this regard, that the only characters who view themselves as the protagonists of their own lives – or, to be precise, of their own "mafia movie" – are the two young, aspiring gangsters Ciro and Marco, who keep acting the parts of goodfellas, in a movie where the other actors seem to have stumbled onto the set and play their non-roles almost reluctantly, as if trying to go unnoticed.  Ciro and Marco, who make references to Scarface and Nikita and parade around in Miami Vice shirts and brandishing machine guns, are Gomorra's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, fully and comically unaware that they are only minor characters in a tragedy, functioning as a perverse sort of comic relief until the main story literally disposes of their petty lives, throwing them in the garbage with a bulldozer, thus making it clear that to the Camorra they are not human beings, but merely organic waste.

It is no surprise then that the only well-known actor in Gomorra, Toni Servillo, who plays Franco, a businessman dealing in the illegal disposal of toxic waste, makes his appearance poking through a manhole, like a rat. Have you ever seen a more unglamorous star entrance? The only character in the film who manages to maintain a shred of human dignity ends up walking away from the camera, refusing to be part of this scenario, and of the rest of the movie, any longer. We are talking about Roberto, the young apprentice who, upon his father's insistence, follows Franco around trying to learn the ropes of his (dirty) business.  Eventually Roberto will decide not to follow in Franco's footsteps, and he will do so by proclaiming himself "different" and walking away, giving his back to the camera, like the hero of a classic Western fading into the sunset, but also like an actor leaving the stage and refusing to play the part.

Little by little, viewers realize that the only characters who have any scenic permanence in Gomorra are objects, not human beings: the drugs and cash endlessly changing hands, flowing from scene to scene like an unstoppable river, upstaging the actors in each and every scene (and yet this passage of cash takes on none of the movie glamour it had in Scorsese's Casino); the violence which strikes at any given moment, deciding who will end up being the main character of a particular scene; the projects of Scampia, ironically named "Le vele" ("the sails"), even if those awful ghetto constructions are not meant to sail anywhere, and will probably survive for much longer than their dwellers; the ubiquitous television sets (even in the apartments of people who cannot afford to feed their children) providing a constant background with their broadcast of news, fiction, advertisements, and assorted disembodied sounds, which give the only audio commentary to what happens in any given scene.

Further deglamorizing organized crime through the subversion of movie conventions, Gomorra not only has no conventional storyline nor any main characters – it also has no musical score. Music is heard only when it is played by the characters, such as the owners of the tanning salon in the initial scenes, Ciro and Marco in the bar by the river, the hoods on their car's stereo. Like all other players in Gomorra, music enters the film casually, and exits it just as abruptly.  There is no underscoring of the mood of a particular scene, in an attempt to create a cinematic atmosphere.  There is only ambient noise, with as the only added "sound effect" the heavy breathing of characters, usually to convey fear. No sentimental Italian music (think of Ennio Morricone or Nino Rota) is added to bring on sympathy for Gomorra's figures, including the victims of a society completely controlled by organized crime; no Motown tracks (think of Scorsese's mafia movies) are added to give rhythm to the "action" scenes, and in that way make violence look cool and camorristas look trendy (in fact, the film is very careful to show  Camorra bosses as they really are: aging lotharios in shorts and flip flops, living not a life of luxury and privilege but one of fear and squalor).

Gomorra's Chinese sweatshop, Neapolitan style: how people become mere numbers, in a pyramid of exploitation

The construction of each and every scene, though carefully planned and painstakingly assembled by Garrone (a Hitchcock-like perfectionist when it comes to the staging of his own films), is meant to convey a constant sense of randomness, a sort of reversed-perspective angle, an overturned visual grammar. Objects of no importance take front stage, while people often blur in the background: the clearest examples are the scenes in the clothing manufacturer's sweatshop, where countless (because they are valued as mere numbers) Chinese immigrants work at their sewing machines, under the unwitting direction of a professional tailor whose only ambition is to make something unique (like the dress that appears on the American movie star on the red carpet of the Venice Film Festival, once again in a televised report) and who is instead forced to produce a series of anonymous clothes assembled by nameless foreign hands, before ending up as a truck driver with no creative outlet.

Garrone's camera follows his film's characters around, sometimes through lengthy continuous shots, but is ready to leave them suddenly, as if losing interest in its subjects, again giving nobody any great importance and glorifying no one. In the general confusion of roles within Gomorra ("We don't even know who is with us and who is against us," says one of the hoods at one point) nobody needs to come across as more interesting, or more sympathetic, than anybody else.

Bodies strewn along the margins of the frame: an example of Garrone's shot composition

Often, in Gomorra's scenes, bodies are merely elements that make up the frame's composition not as human beings but as dark silhouettes against the backdrop of poorly lit hallways and rooms. No "respect" is given to the integrity of the human figure, as men and women become disembodied parts walking in and out of the frame and turn into odd shapes or cardboard cutouts: witness the scene, towards the end of the movie, after the shooting in the project that the mafia accountant flees, where the corpses lay strewn across the floor like an abstract painting. In many instances, the scale of human beings is altered in favor of that of objects: think about Franco poking his head out of the manhole, seemingly minute against the Hopperesque gas station surrounding him, or the overbearing size of the bulldozer fork in the last scene, compared to the lifeless bodies of Ciro and Marco.

As in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup, in Garrone's Gomorra an artist's carefully staged sequences are intentionally deprived of a visible center, and important actions as well as characters are confined to the margins of the frame, communicating a perpetual sense of unbalance and visual discomfort and symbolizing the lack of control of those characters over their own circumnstances. In recreating a world of disorder and chaos – alas, a "Gomorra" – Matteo Garrone has directed a movie whose form mirrors precisely its content, even if this has meant creating a decidedly uncinematic piece of work and subverting many filmic rules, as well as creating an unsettling and sometimes unpleasant experience for viewers who are used to a more conventional narrative style, a few main characters (possibly likeable and easy to identify with) leading them along the storyline, the comforts of music, the reassurance of traditional scene compositions. Garrone's uncompromising narrative style and his unwillingness to indulge the public's taste and viewing habits are meant to reproduce the harsh reality of Scampia's residents, who cannot escape the ugliness of their surroundings and the claustrophobia of their predicament.

For these reasons Gomorra has often been likened to a documentary, whereas no recent Italian fiction film has been more carefully planned, more consciously carried out, or more selflessly acted: many of the players who come across as "taken from the street" are fully trained theater performers who just chose to look like real people.

It has been said (by the likes of Martin Scorsese) that Gomorra follows in the tradition of Italian Neorealism, particularly Roberto Rossellini's, but many have also observed that it lacks Neorealism's sentimentalism, its warmth, its humanity.  Perhaps it is because postwar Italy, though impoverished and chaotic, managed to maintain the basic respect for human dignity and the empathy that have since disappeared from the hellish ghettos of Naples, as well as from much of Italian contemporary society – even that not directly involved with organized crime.

Paola Casella
© FIPRESCI 2010

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