Gomorra

I often ask myself when watching a semi-realistic movie, If you took all the pumped-up Hollywood drama out of this screenplay and just filmed these ordinary people living their particular lives, would there be anything left worth watching? This is the sort of thing that indie filmmakers try to do all the time, and I suspect that mostly the results are crap. The exceptional independent films that succeed in turning ordinary human life into compelling viewing are the only ones you will ever hear about, and perhaps even see. This selection effect might give you the mistaken impression that genius is rampant outside the Hollywood system.

Nevertheless, Gomorra is one of the exceptional ones, and has left me with lingering and unsettled images of the contemporary streetlife of the Camorra, the oldest crime syndicate in Italy: Concrete tenements largely vacant, chemical waste landfills, smoothly-run sweatshops and bottom-level drug distribution houses, bulldozers on empty beaches. The atmosphere is oppressive, hollow and gray. The Neapolitans depicted are not a passionate people but a deadened one, mechanical and nervous in the way they occupy their broad, quiet, half-developed, seemingly forgotten seaside. Boring thugs commit sudden and unexciting murders, always getting the drop. There is never a gunfight.