Gomorrah is brutal. That much goes without saying, given the genre. But unlike the more glamorous American gangster movies, which tend to elevate their anti-heroes to aspirational role models, Gomorrah turns that brutality against its subject — the widespread operations of Italy’s Camorrah clan. Like the bestselling exposé that inspired it, Gomorrah is more outraged than impressed by the corrupt world it reveals. To that end, director Matteo Garrone cast coarse, physically revolting adults and shot the film in an almost nauseating handheld style, fleshing out the authentic hell-on-earth locations with the sound of screams and harsh urban noise.
These are not characters or situations anyone would want to emulate, which was important to the director and his team. “Here in the south of Italy, we are living so close to this problem that we have to consider what kind of example a movie can have, especially on young people,” says Maurizio Braucci, who collaborated with Garrone, Roberto Saviano (author of the nonfiction bestseller on which Gomorrah is based) and three other writers. In his book, Saviano is openly critical of Hollywood’s impact on these criminals. He describes one boss who ordered a villa custom-built to the specifications of Tony Montana’s mansion in Scarface, then goes on to explain how The Godfather dictated their fashion sense (pinstriped suits and dark glasses) and Pulp Fiction made them sloppy (by holding their guns sideways, young killers sacrificed aim for style, making executions needlessly bloody and painful).
“I think the problem is that audiences are generally attracted by stories about the obscure part of life,” says Braucci (the English speaker of the bunch). “Gomorrah tries to give a different representation of this world, including such a terrible representation of the criminals – their bodies, the way they walk, the way they talk — that they seem almost like monsters.” Like Saviano (who had to go under police protection a couple weeks into the screenwriting process), Braucci hails from the Camorrah-controlled Naples area, bringing his own research and experience to the adaptation.
The book itself is an overwhelming litany of crime, murder and corruption, full of violent incidents but lacking in strong central characters or an organized dramatic structure. Much of the screenwriters’ work focused on refining Saviano’s sprawling exposé to half a dozen representative stories — a tailor who upsets the clan by assisting a rival Chinese outfit, a sanitation executive who hires children to illegally dump toxic waste, two drug-dealing teens (and Scarface fans) who conspire to usurp their bosses’ business — and establishing the psychology of those involved.
“The movie was shot inside the territory of the Camorrah where these things happened,” Braucci explains. The run-down apartment building where much of the action takes place, including the dramatic execution of a woman in broad daylight, would normally be off-limits to outsiders, but Braucci had earned something of an all-access pass thanks to his work with a community theater project. To help disguise their true agenda, he says, “we called the movie ‘Six Short Stories’ because we were afraid the Camorrah would have a problem if they saw the title Gomorrah.”
Though the subject matter can’t help but evoke the work of such Italian-American directors as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, Garrone’s true inspiration was his country’s rugged neorealist tradition. The actors may look like nonprofessionals, but most came from theater programs, carefully chosen for their faces — angelic, in the case of the kids (many of whom were cast from Braucci’s workshop), harsh and unpleasant for the older characters who exploit them. Some of the performers even had criminal connections: One actor had spent 10 years in jail, where he first studied theater, and three others were arrested after the film.
The film is light on exposition and context, thrusting the audience directly into its (under)world and expecting them to read important backstory into the actors’ physical appearances. The action often feels raw and immediate enough that many audiences have mistaken the film for a documentary. “But you would not be able to watch a murder or a drug sale in a documentary, so Gomorrah is a fake documentary,” Braucci explains.
Still, Garrone embraced improvisation and happy accidents, allowing the unpredictable to enrich the film’s sense of reality (another reason he kept Braucci on hand during production — so he could assist with frequent on-set rewrites). During the film’s most iconic scene, in which two Hollywood-obsessed teens stripped to their skivvies fire machine guns into the sea, a pyrotechnic glitch heightened the actors’ reactions: Both characters were supposed to shoot the boat before it exploded, but the blast came early. “If you watch the actor, you can see the expression on his face was real surprise,” Braucci says.
Without turning the narrative into a heavy-handed morality tale, Garrone and his team see to it that consequences eventually catch up with characters. In the world of the Camorrah, no one can outrun his fate, and when executions do happen, the victims aren’t canonized in the operatic fashion of Scarface, but rather treated like so much garbage in need of disposing. “This is the first big movie about the Camorrah in Italy,” Braucci says. “It’s like a dark fable about how innocence and youth are destroyed by this dehumanizing process of modernity. In this case, criminal organizations are the source of this destructive energy, but it is a metaphor for any part of this world that is under the oppression of the dark or evil.”
Gomorrrah, currently in theaters in New York and LA, premieres on VOD today. Its theatrical release expands later this month.
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