Forthcoming in D. Renga (ed), The Mafia Movie Reader. Toronto: Toronto UP, 2010.

Dispatches from Hell: Gomorra by Matteo Garrone

Pierpaolo Antonello (University of Cambridge)

Gomorra (2008) is the sixth feature film by Matteo Garrone (1968), one of the

most interesting and promising Italian directors of his generation, creator of the much-

praised Limbalsamatore [The Taxidermist] (2002).1 Gomorra is based on the highly

successful book by Roberto Saviano, Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent

International Empire of Naples Organized Crime System (2006), a semi-fictional

account of the economic and military power of the Camorra, the Campania based crime

organization that has been ruling the Caserta and Neapolitan hinterland for decades,

killing more people than any other criminal organization in Europe, and extending its

interests and tentacles well beyond the regional and national borders.2 Savianos book,

which sold more than a million copies in Italy, is an act of overt denunciation of the

forgotten war which has been devastating and poisoning an entire Italian region, but

which has achieved little resonance in the collective national consciousness: in 30 years

the Camorra murdered more than 10 thousand people, more than the people killed in the

Gaza strip; its empire has an economic turnover that is more than three times FIATs

worldwide.3 Despite being more ferocious and brutal than the Sicilian Mafia, more

ruthless in the open display of its criminal actions, the System, as it is called locally, has

been given much less attention in the Italian media (and in iternational mythology),

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perhaps being considered as just one more endemic or chronic social disease of the south

(no different from the Mafia in this). Because of its success Savianos book was so hard-

hitting and so effective in opening up the phenomenon to national attention that an

inevitable death threat from the Camorra has forced him into hiding, making Saviano a

sort of Italian Salman Rushdie. The media attention and public and critical praise

inevitably prompted various adaptations of the book, in particular a theatrical version by

Mario Gelardi (2007), and Matteo Garrones movie.4 Because the film was produced in

the midst of the public plaudits for Savianos work, and because the writer co-authored

the screenplay,5 a contextual discussion of both the novel and the film is needed, as they

could be considered two complementary parts of a similar artistic and political project.

The title of both book and movie obviously is a Biblical reference. The play is

with Camorra, drawing a parallel between the Naples crime system and the ancient

Palestinian city of Gomorrah, which, according to Genesis 19:24, was destroyed (along

with Sodom) by fire from heaven because of the wickedness of its inhabitants. However,

although an underlying moral tension inspires both the book and the movie, in Garrones

film the diegetic narrator is ostensibly omitted. The testimonial nature and moral

indignation at the core of Savianos social denunciation and of the general rhetoric of the

book,6 is totally bracketed off in the film, where the camera is the only witness to events

that are explored in a hyper-realistic, raw manner, without further comment or judgment.

In fact, the crudeness and the brutal aspects of the movie are arguably more effective in

showing a reality that evinces apocalyptic features, and in which no redemption or hope

is in sight either for the protagonists or for society as a whole. In that sense, the title is

more apt to describe the film than Savianos book, vividly depicting in a stunning,

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unsettling manner the Camorra underworld as sort of modern Dantes Inferno: the

claustrophobic univers concentrationnaire of the failed modernization of the Vele

housing project with its cramped flats, dirty grey walls, dark and ominous corners and

walkways, where drug dealing, guns and killing are the daily bread; the digging and

raping of a countryside once dubbed Campania felix for its fertility, now polluted and

poisoned by tons of chemicals and trash; the heavy, grey sky which hangs over sleazy

landscapes, as if the sunshine and conventional postcard beauty normally associated with

this part of Italy had disappeared and a moral darkness had taken its place.

Just as the book is a narrative reportage structured in different episodes, the film

is organized around five intertwined stories presented chronologically without flashback.

The first story is that of Don Ciro, the submarine, whose job is discretely to distribute a

monthly salary to families who have a relative in prison because of service to the local

bosses. In one case (the second story), Maria is the mother of a Scissionista who has

recently defected from the criminal group Don Ciro works for to the rival one. For this

reason, she will be killed mercilessly and her murderers will use a young local delivery

boy, Tot, as a decoy to lure her to her death. The third narrative strand is the story of

Franco, a stakeholder who helps to dispose of the toxic waste produced by the chemical

industries of Northern Italy, illegally filling up old mines and ruthlessly poisoning a vast

part of the Neapolitan region. The episode flags up the complicity of the rest of the Italy

in feeding the Camorras illegal activities, one of the main tenets of Savianos book.

Central to the episode is the presence of Roberto, Francos young assistant, who

eventually decides to quit his job as an act of revolt against his apparently clean but, in

actuality, morally rotten trade. His first name clearly refers to Saviano himself, for the

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character seems designed to showcase Savianos political and ethical stand, but also his

status as insider, who has seen the System first-hand. The insertion of Roberto perhaps

signals a felt need for at least an instance of moral critique in the film but is, however, a

rather watered-down version of Savianos moral indignation and the strong diegetic voice

presented in the book. The character of Roberto might easily have been removed without

damage to the film; his presence arguably has a weak resonance with the spectator and

possibly producing an opposite effect to that intended. The solitary and individual act of

rejection/revolt is far too feeble within the overall ethos of the society described in the

movie, and it appears only as a hopeless, romantic, quixotic gesture.

One of the most memorable of Savianos chapters, which has been with good

reason retained for the screen, is the story of Pasquale, an exploited Master Tailor who

crafts expensive dresses at very low cost for major Northern Italian fashion brands.

Persuaded by money and a need for respect to teach his craft to workers in a Chinese-run

factory, he barely escapes a gun assault intended as a warning from the local bosses; he

decides to leave his trade thereafter and becomes a truck driver. In the final scene of his

story, at a gas station, he watches on the bar television as one of his dresses is worn by

Scarlett Johansson at the premiere of the Venice Film Festival. Finally, the closing

episode possibly the most brutal and vivid is the story of two young stray dogs,

Marco and Ciro, who try to live up to the myth of the self-made gangster, epitomized in

their imagination by Tony Montana, the protagonist of Brian De Palmas film Scarface

(1983). Attempting to break their way into the crime underworld with adolescent

audacity and recklessness, they defy the control of the local boss and come to an

inevitable end. They are ambushed and unceremoniously killed, treated as a simple

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inconvenience, an annoyance for the gangsters in control of the area, and their bodies are

disposed off with a bulldozer like useless waste.

Despite the apparent narrative complexity, the storylines are never heavily plotted

and there is no real psychological investigation of the characters. The daily reality of

thousands of Italians living outside of any legal boundaries are explored with obsessive

camera work mostly performed by the director himself, making this film almost a work

of social anthropology. On this score, both Garrones movie and Savianos book have

been seen as signaling the exhaustion of the postmodern aesthetic, dominant in Italy as

elsewhere in the 80s and 90s; book and film have been emphatically celebrated as a

return to reality and as a call for new forms of social and political engagement.7

However, as in any art form, there are formal and representational elements that cannot

be neglected, and which are clearly present in both works. Although documentarist in

nature, Savianos book is actually a docu-fiction, and it adopts imaginative twists and

explicit stylistic and rhetorical modalities to engage the reader; Garrones movie, despite

its hyper-realistic charge, is never presented as a documentary (although the

cinematographic style was according to Garroneborrowed from war reportage), but

it is deliberately structured as a work of fiction, of imagination: if there is any political

value in the film Garrone has noted is because of the language it adopts rather than

the theme it presents.8

On this score, the director seems to borrow more or less consciously the critically

celebrated Dogma 95 cinematic style:9 filming is done on location, mostly at the Vele

housing project in Scampia, a neighborhood north of Naples; apart from the pulsing,

hypnotic tune of the closing titles (Herculaneum by Massive Attack), and few seconds

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during the title sequence, all the music in the film is diegetic either heard on juke-

boxes, players or car radios; hand-held cameras are extensively used as they follow the

action closely; special and artificial lighting or optical filters are never employed; there is

no temporal or geographical alienation (the film takes place here and now); the aspect

ratio of 4:3 is maintained and the spectacular widescreen that Garrone used in The

Taxidermist to shoot the Campania coast is avoided;10 finally and most important for a

film which deals with organized crime it cannot be straight-forwardly defined as a

genre movie (although it can surely be analyzed as such), nor can it be easily

pigeonholed as a return to neorealism (a label that has been much over-used in Italian

cinema). Garrone seems to explicitly resort, at least partially, to the acting approach made

famous by neorealist masters like Vittorio De Sica or later practicioners of realist

filmmaking such as Pier Paolo Pasolini. He in fact spent several months on location at

the Vele housing complex, familiarizing himself with the neighborhood, with the local

people and their ethos. Some of the locals perform in the movie, both as protagonists and

extras. This is undoubtedly one of the strengths of Garrones film, and the performances

elicited from the non-professional actors represents a brilliant accomplishment by the

young director. The population was very available he commented on this score.

They participated whole-heartedly, and they were the first spectators of the film. When

we shot these scenes, they were always looking on, providing advice, and participating

actively. However, the reality he depicts is never innocent, or authentic in

Pasolinian terms, but it is already imbued with spectacular and cinematic elements:

Often, its the cinema that helps to shape these peoples taste, and not the opposite...

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Even if the film denounces a given reality, it moves in a different direction. Its not

designed to be a kind of an inquiry....11

The mark of this awareness is present in the very first scene, before the opening

titles, set in a beauty salon, where three gang members are gunned down while they are

tanning themselves and having their nails polished. The estrangement and the grotesque

oddness produced by the juxtaposition of the violent act, the inanimate bodies clumsily

trapped within the sun booths, the artificial, almost science-fiction-like blue hue of the

fluorescent lamps, and the incongruous (but typically Neapolitan) neomelodic tune

which is playing in the background, makes the opening scene a spectacular, almost

Tarantinesque, exercise which is both real and performative, both factual and cinematic

as it obviously plays with the variation on the barbershop murder theme made famous by

a number of genre movies.

There are also various inter-cinematic references in Gomorra, as for instance in

the scene when a large statue of Padre Pio is roped down from a balcony in the Vele

housing project, possibly a reference to the Christ hanging from a helicopter in the

opening scene of Federico Fellinis La dolce vita, an allusion that adds a bitter-sweet

ironic twist to the setting. This sense of incongruity is reinforced by a wide panning shot

over a group of boys who are playing in a shallow plastic swimming pool on one of the

highest terraces of Le Vele, as if it were an unlikely Hollywood setting (also a reference

to the initial scene of La dolce vita). The powerful scene in which Ciro and Marco unload

their stolen rifles and Kalashnikovs into the empty space of a swamp under a gloomy sky,

yelling and singing, is vaguely reminiscent of Apocalypse now, while the lap-dance

parlour were they venture at one point was made paradigmatic by the famous Bada-bing

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strip-club in The Sopranos (itself a Godfather reference); finally, the disposal of Ciro and

Marcos bodies with a bulldozer after they are killed reflects a similar sequence in Il

camorrista by Giuseppe Tornatore (1986).12 However, the most revealing scene is Marco

and Ciros aping of Tony Scarface Montanas gestures and way of speaking. This scene

was actually filmed in the house (later confiscated and burned to the ground) belonging to

a real Camorra boss, Walter Schiavone, who had had his villa (locally dubbed

Hollywood) planned and constructed as a perfect replica of Montanas house in

Scarface.

By making all these inter-filmic, inter-cinematic references, Garrone is not trying

to play any clever post-modern game with the audience, but to convey the particular

short-circuit between reality and fiction that was highlighted by Saviano in his book (and

had already been parodically explored in a series like The Sopranos). The gangsters have

such a deep desire to be represented and glamorized by the movie industry that they

borrow their mannerisms and general attitude from what they see on the screen.

Commenting on Savianos book, Antonio Tricomi writes that [the bosses] know that in

our contemporary society one has to be constantly on stage, and that the media

representation is more important than reality, to the point that the former replaces the

latter. Therefore, they do aesthetize their power, which will run short if not transformed

in a ritualistic spectacle; this is why they constantly try to impersonate the most famous

cinematographic models of killers, cleverly exploiting the media, aping those film

characters in front of TV crews and cameras.13

This appears to be something of a central concern for Garrone. He makes explicit

his awareness of the artificial construction of any film, and most of all of the

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conventional nature of films about the mafia (a whole repertoire of movies and an

established genre, as the present book testifies); however, as a form of political gesture,

he deliberately works against the common expectations attached to the genre. By opting

for a radically realistic, almost documentary-like approach, he aims to refuse the

mobsters any potentially enthusiastic or self-congratulatory response to the film. He

offers an un-glamorized image of their lives and their business: they are sweaty, dirty,

badly dressed, overweight, unhealthy (one of them suffers from throat cancer and speaks

via an artificial voice aid in a way which is grotesque and ominous). The crudeness of the

photography, the roughness of the settings, the fact that some of the actors are non-

professionals; these are all aspects that seem to provide a direct antidote to the glossy

outlook of much of the film production on the subject of organized crime. The gunfight

or execution scenes are brutal but unspectacular; guns are never displayed as in westerns

or mob movies but are instead effectively and sparingly used by killers, as in real life.

Sounds also seem realistic and is not lent special emphasis by special effects. Suspense is

kept to a minimum, to the point that spectators are surprised by the murderous actions

much in the same way as the victims. In this sense, Garrone seems to be more radical

than Saviano in peeling away any form of allure and glitz from the lives of the gangsters.

Indeed, Savianos book may risk glamorizing the Camorra phenomenon. In emphasizing

the capacity of the new generations of camorristi to navigate the economic complexity of

a globalized society, their ability to defy the law and institutional control, their

sophisticated and self-aware use of the mass-media, the Neapolitan writer seems, on the

one hand, to endorse the idea that the Mafia system is the most appropriate and successful

model available to navigate and flourish in our globalized, post-democratic, society;14 on

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the other hand, he indirectly flirts with the darker side of the alluring evil, by presenting

in such a vivid and effective manner the incredible and brutal deeds of these gangsters.

Garrone's movie, conversely, without seeming to signal it as a deliberate and

programmatic gesture, has nonetheless a political and ethical relevance because it

proffers a new gaze into the Camorra underworld, stripping away its mythology,

magnifying the incongruous mannerisms of the camorristi, surveying with an almost

anthropological gaze the total desolation of their lives, their confinement in a world

without hope, without a single moment of truce or reprieve. Gomorra is a sort of degree

zero representation of the mafia, in a manner that it is highly effective both from a

cinematic and ethical standpoint.

1
Besides the two cited, Garrones movies are: Terra di mezzo [Midland] (1997), Ospiti

[Guests] (1998), Estate romana [Roman summer] (2000) and Primo amore [First Love]

(2003).
2
Roberto Saviano, Gomorra. Viaggio nell'impero economico e nel sogno di dominio

della camorra (Milan: Mondadori, 2006). English translations: Gomorrah: A personal

journey into the violent international empire of Naples organized crime system (New

York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); Gomorrah: Italy's other Mafia (London:

McMillan 2008).
3
Giuseppina Manin, Ma il vero eroe si chiama Saviano, Corriere della Sera, May 19,

2008.
4
Cfr. Roberto Savianos website: www.robertosaviano.it.
5
The other screeplayers are Maurizio Braucci, Ugo Chiti, Gianni Di Gregorio, Matteo

Garrone, Massimo Gaudioso.

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6
On the unresolved and ambiguous tension between the testimonial and rhetorical

aspects of Savianos book, see Gilda Policastros review in Allegoria 57 (2008): 185-90.
7
See for instance Ritorno alla realt? Narrativa e cinema alla fine del postmoderno, ed.

by R. Donnarumma, G. Policastro, G. Taviani, Allegoria 57 (2008): 7-93.

8
Gomorra. Intervista al regista Matteo Garrone: http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=X1V4l-

PIT8E.
9
Dogma 95 was an avant-garde filmmaking movement started in 1995 by the Danish

directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg with the signing of the Dogma 95

Manifesto and the Vow of Chastity, ten rules to which any Dogma film must conform.

The goal of the Dogma collective is to purify filmmaking by refusing expensive and

spectacular special effects, postproduction modifications and other gimmicks. The

emphasis on purity forces the filmmakers to focus on the actual story and on the actors'

performances.
10
Cfr. Gianni Valentino, Garrone: In due mesi a Scampia ho capito la lotta per

sopravvivere, La Repubblica, April 25, 2008.

11
Press Conference, Gomorrah: http://www.festival-cannes.fr/en/article/56095.html.
12
The scene when Franco and Roberto exit a container filled with toxic waste wearing

astronaut-like gas masks and suits, with the only sound that of their diegetic breathing, is

reminiscent of outer space sequences in Stanley Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey

(1968).
13
A. Tricomi, Roberto Saviano, Gomorra, Allegoria 57 (2008): 192.
14
See for instance C. Tilly, War Making and State Making as a Organized Crime, in

Bringing the State Back in, ed. by P.B. Evans et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University

11
Press, 1985); L. Cavallaro, Il modello mafioso e la societ globale (Rome: Manifestolibri,

2004).

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