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The
Camorra is a mafia-like organization that operates in the region
of Italy in and around Naples, its tentacles reaching everywhere…
and Gomorrah is both a stunning documentary-like thriller
and a lament for those who are inexorably drawn into the only life
made available to them - a hell of drugs and crime. Directed
by Matteo Garrone, Gomorrah is a blindingly violent film -
nothing is spared in its widescreen glory - nothing is
sentimentalized or romanticized as in Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather
films or the HBO series The Sopranos.
Adapted
from Roberto Saviano's nonfiction account of the Camorra, the film
follows a group the residents in a run-down housing complex that
looks like some large and battered ship that has come ashore on a
hapless Neapolitan hillside. Everything is falling apart,
from rusting hinges on doors to water piping; the people
themselves appear to be survivors of some earthly apocalypse,
psychologically beaten down and physically devastated.
Beaten
down indeed, for the Camorra is an octopus with a thousand
tentacles that has risen from the depths to strangle this ark-like
structure, squeezing the very life from it, running its economy on
a corrupt system of patronage and fear, demanding submission with
deadly attacks on anyone who will not play their terrible
game. The film tells separate stories that entwine, each one
a tragedy. In one scene, two rather dumb and naïve young
men who think they can beat the mafia at its own game parade
around a local beach in their underwear spraying the air with
machine gun fire. It's a perfectly absurd image that
encapsulates the great tragedy of lost talent and lost lives in
the Mezzogiorno.
And
then there is the other Italy; how to reconcile the two? We
recently picked up Shirley Hazzard's Ancient Shore, Dispatches
from Naples, where she says: "Whether I wake these
mornings in Naples to the Mediterranean lapping the seawall or on
Capri to the sight of a nobly indifferent mountain, it is never
without realizing, in surprise and gratitude, that I - like
Goethe, like Byron - am living in Italy." Perhaps, there is a
choice. There always is.
See:
Gomorrah,
dir. by Matteo Garrone
Read:
The
Ancient Shore, Dispatches from Naples, Shirley Hazzard
Tags:
hazzard
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