Gomorrah (2008)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Gomorrah (2008) – M. Garrone

Episodes drawn from the pages of Roberto Saviano’s exposé of the Camorra crime family (from which he now needs constant police protection), laid out unblinkingly in all their harshness and violence.  Little context is provided and apparently even Italian viewers needed subtitles to understand the local dialects here.  Basically, we are thrown into a world focused on a tenement slum where a brutal gang war is occurring, as the young turks aim to unseat the corrupt and greedy mob bosses.  There is a lot of collateral damage. Mostly, we follow kids caught up in the action, having fun modelling their behaviour on that of the men around them – and sometimes going too far.  When we aren’t seeing mobsters kill each other for revenge or over drug deals, we follow a subplot that reveals that the crime family also makes money by buying and illegally dumping hazardous waste (presumably for major companies).  Even more than the chaotically violent hoods, the crook in this scheme is intensely amoral/immoral; when one of his truckers is burned by chemicals and they protest, he gets a bunch of 11-year-old kids to drive the trucks full of waste instead.  Another subplot takes place in the fashion industry where the gang competes with the Chinese.  No one with a shred of decency seems able to survive in this brutal world (yet we do see cars passing on a local highway, suggesting the real world might exist a step away, unaware or turning a blind eye to the actions here).  Visceral and gripping with most of the plot arcs closed by the end but leaving the possibility that the ugly status quo continues. Later this apparently became a TV series.