Gomorrah

2008

Crime

Italy

Madman Entertainment

R4 DVD

Reviewer: by Bob Estreich

Gomorrah is five parallel stories about the criminal gang that runs the Naples underworld. The gang is known as the Camorra. In many ways similar to the U.S Mafia, they have fingers in many pies – drugs, toxic waste disposal, gun running, etc. There are rival gangs fighting for control of the depressed areas, the old public housing slums.

The first thread of the story is of Toto, a 13-year-old who has decided that the only way out of his poverty is to join a gang. He does not quite realise what this involves until he is called on to lead a woman that he knows into an execution trap.

Franco is a respectable-looking businessman whose specialty is hiring old quarries on good farming land for the illegal disposal of toxic waste. He knows he is poisoning the farming land and its people but is completely amoral about it.

Pasquale is a tailor working for a sweatshop firm. He finds he can make more money by teaching the rival Chinese. The Camorra will not stand for this as they make their cut from the Italian firm and feel rather protective about those they parasite off.

Marco and Ciro, a pair of foolish amateurs, decide to steal guns from one of the gangs and start their own crime empire. The Camorra will not stand for this, either, and the result is predictable.

Don Ciro is an “accountant” who pays out a little money on behalf of the gang to the families of those gang members who are currently imprisoned. He is basically a coward, but he is forced to choose sides when warfare breaks out with a splinter gang in an attempt to save his own life. Will he choose right?

These stories are unrelated, simply serving as demonstrations of the Camorra’s grip on the Naples underworld. They are only seen as part of the whole problem when the statistics are presented at the end of the film – four thousand murders in the last thirty years, drug earnings by one gang estimated at half a million Euros a DAY. Roberto Saviano’s book has been well transferred to film, with no particular gloss added. There is a fair amount of violence but it is in no way glorified. There are no heroes in this film. It is a grim film of people just trying to get on with life. Some manage, some adapt, some die. It is not a nice film but it is compelling.

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This review will appear in Volume 2 No.6 (2009) of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.

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