Waste, disposal: Gomorrah

Based on the 2006 Italian non-fiction bestseller that made its journalist author Roberto Saviano into both a literary sensation and fugitive from the mob at the age of 26, Gomorrah is a sprawling crime film involving a range of characters and narratives linked via their individual contributions to the poisoned ecosystem of the Camorra, the powerful, organized syndicate whose influence seeps deep into the social fabric of its native Naples, of Italy, and beyond. As directed by Matteo Garrone, this is a film that weaves its way through an immense grid of institutionalized crime as though it were charting an infernal floor plan in time. It’s an epic without the token grandiosity. An epic of pathos? Anyway, something uniquely monstrous, cold and fascinating, and not to be missed.

Waste and disposal form the bedrock of Gomorrah. The proliferation both literally and figuratively throughout is a product of the film’s structural and thematic elegance. That life is cheap here is made clear from the slaughter in the spa that kicks things off. The motives behind these killings are left unexplained because, really, what difference does it make? The carnage is conveyed flatly, the camera nonplussed by the display of a few more bodies being tossed into the mafia’s self-generating meat grinder. Garrone’s approach to the material emphasizes the network and durability of crime, not its allure, because its allure isn’t even necessary in a milieu that dutifully perpetuates its existence. The world of Gomorrah is deterministic. There is no ethnic charm. There is no glamour, no beauty, no opera to the violence, no catchy tunes or flamboyant editing or orgasmic geysers of blood. But there’s plenty horror and insight, too, or at the very least inspired exposé. You have to admire Martin Scorsese for coming on as presenter of Gomorrah for its North American release. It’s in many ways the antithesis of the sort of exhilarating, frenetic bloodletting found in several of Scorsese’s most celebrated films, but Scorsese’s smart enough to recognize that this is precisely why the film is vital. By taking distance from its subject, by capturing it in a documentary style conventionally alien to the genre, Gomorrah excavates the myth of the crime syndicate in a way I don’t think we’ve seen before.

There are two young punks (Marco Macor and Ciro Petrone) under the idiotic belief that they can work independently and even in opposition to the Camorra. They delight in stealing a secret stash of heavy weaponry, and a memorable sequence finds them stripping to their underpants and running along some sludge-lined shoreline blowing random shit up. There is a dour money handler (Gianfelice Imparato) who makes the rounds of the dismal housing complex that functions as the film’s nucleus, collecting and doling out payments. There’s a 13-year-old (Salvatore Abruzzese) who feels ready to be recruited into the Camorra, allowing himself to be shot in the chest while wearing a battered old ballistic vest. “Now you’re a man,” he’s told afterwards. He seems so young, but his youth’s put in perspective by a bleakly comical scene in which a large crew of little kids are employed to drive trucks whose pedals they can’t reach and whose dashboards they can’t see over. In one of the film’s most surprising narratives we find a compromised tailor (Salvatore Cantalupo) who risks his life to teach a warehouse full of Asians the finer points of haute design and construction. He’s escorted to the training facility in the trunk of a car. The tailor was for me the closer thing the film offers to identification, perhaps because of the character’s almost singular thread of integrity, perhaps for the simple fact that Cantalupo gives such a curiously detailed and intriguingly enigmatic performance.

My favourite part of Gomorrah however involves a businessman (Toni Servillo) and his apprentice (Carmine Paternoster) who find locations for their hired crews to illegally dump toxic waste. It’s rare to find modern stories that explore waste disposal as a major theme, through Don DeLillo’s Underworld serves as a brilliant prototype. Where we put the colossal heaps of poisonous trash is arguably one of the great taboo subjects, its invisibility—at least in wealthy countries—being essential to our false sense of peace with our surroundings. It’s an inspired metaphor that manifests here in some awesome and troubling imagery. The burial of undesirable matter is brutally echoed toward the film’s end, when the bodies of undesirable men are disposed of through similar means. I suppose the only hope we’re given that this state of affairs might change comes through the implication that, sooner or later, everything poorly interred will rise to the surface.