Gomorra

We have now three 2009 movie candidates that Hollywood, even with most honourable of intentions, could not embrace: Waltz With Bashir, which by all rights should have won the 2009 Oscar for Best Foreign Language movie; Che, rebuffed by America's most influential critics with condescension and scorn, and now Gomorra, an astonishing eye-opener of a movie, rejected by the Oscars for Best Foreign Film nomination this year, even though Gomorra has been a socko boffo hit in Europe, winning the grand prize at Cannes last May and the European Best Film Award. No matter.

Why? Gomorra is just so much not a Hollywood movie. We discussed the why of this in the Q&A after screening Sunshine Cleaning. Gomorra deals with the wretched of the earth, the downtrodden, pummeled by free-wheeling dog-eat-dog enterprise. Yeah, it’s a gangster movie, but not a Hollywood gangster movie. No ‘un bel di’ opera arias as the tommyguns firecracker the soundtrack. No splatter killings, blood speckling the ceilings. No poignant spaghetti dinners. No James Gondalfini in analysis. No uplifting mamas. No Scorsese conflation of saga and migrants and money and violence and honour and family. No monumentality, in other words. Just the abject poor, and their lives.

Gomorra, then is a gangster movie without gangsters. Just day-laborer slugs, indentured at birth into a Hades of grinding slavery that's existed in Naples since Jesus attended Sunday school: the hapless whose metier just happens to be criminality. Killings of course, abound but not gaudy Hollywood bloodletting. Here every life is disposable. According to a subtitle, over the past 30 years the Naples-based Camorra has murdered 4,000 of its own.

Females as serious people, you’ll be unsurprised to read, play no substantive role in any of Gomorra's five subplots. They are sweathouse extras in an illegal immigrant needle factory, strippers in a sex club.

Like Che, Gomorra is shot for the most part handheld documentary-style, wide-shot masters, weaving together five hardscrabble slums-of-Naples stories. Indeed, the Neapolitan dialect is so impenetrable, it feels like a documentary. Some Italian audiences required subtitles. Although a vast political/economic corruption touches every character, this isn’t some Euro artsy denunciation of capitalism. Despite the Italian economic miracle and red brigades, nothing Italian ever changes. Just relentless spinning hamster cage existences of petty criminality: shakedowns, bloodlettings, hookers, PCB disposal as the uneducated poor do whatever for their own survival. Which means the wretched behave like gangsters. Hundred of kids, tykes, urchins swarm in the squalor as drug mules, as lookouts.

The title, Gomorra is a Biblical pun of sorts, word-playing on the Neapolitan mob being known as the Camorra. In the Bible, an avenging God destroyed Gomorra with fire and brimstone. Here in Camorra, Global Capitalism thrives. The Italian profiteers – according to one subtitle – net 150 Billion Euros a year. Yet, the overlords are not visible in this movie. Nor are the politicos - the Andreottis, the Moros - who forever proclaim the Italian miracle. Nor the middlemen - the bankers - major investors in reconstructing New York’s Twin Towers. And of course, no His Holiness and his Blessed are the poor..

I must own up to my own laissez-faire indifference toward petty criminality. Must be my snooty private school breeding. Even on my most languorous of days, I seldom read Montreal Gazette's Bill Marsden’s crime exposés: some cadaver of a petty crook, found in a dumpster in a Verdun alley; a cocaine bust on the waterfront; toxic PCBs in LaSalle; hookers, on the hoof working the Main; containers of illegal immigrants; drug wars between bike gangs; mobsters controlling the meat trade; contraband cigarettes across the St. Lawrence. Who cares?

And yet in Gomorra, Bill Marsden crime stories are the measured pivotal plotlines that drive forward this movie. Gomorra even resembles Montreal's decaying Olympic Village pyramids. A toxic waste specialist fills a stone quarry with PCBs; a 13 year old mule lures his much beloved neighbor to her assassination; a tailor makes dresses for Scarlett Johannson; two cocky wannabes think they own their world. The very banality of it all. Every day grist for the Bill Marsden mill.

Gomorra is one terrifying terrific gangster movie.