Life in the trenches

Matteo Garrone on Gomorrah, his adaptation
of Roberto Saviano’s bestselling book
about the powerful Napolitano criminal
organization the Camorra

DANGER ZONE: Le Vele

by MARK SLUTSKY

Roberto Saviano was supposed to be dead by now. Late last year, high-ranking members of the Naples-area constellation of criminal organizations known as the Camorra allegedly vowed to murder him by Christmas, but he survives, accompanied at all times by five police officers assigned to guard his life. What incurred the wrath of what its members refer to only as “The System” wasn’t a business deal gone wrong, a theft, or testimony in a gangland trial; it was a book.

Saviano’s non-fiction bestseller Gomorrah blew the lid open, seemingly for the first time, on the brilliant intricacies of the clans that rule Naples and its violent suburbs. Their existence was never a secret in Italy, but the details were. The book lays bare, in obsessively observed detail, the almost seamless relationship between the clans’ illegal activities and the supposedly legitimate business world.

While they enjoy monopolies on arms and drug dealing, the System also has a huge stake in both the skilled needlework that supports the Italian fashion industry and the near-perfect knock-offs of Italian labels you can find in stores all over the world, as well as in waste dumping and construction. Money from their criminal activities is funnelled into businesses around the world. It’s capitalism in its purest form, completely unfettered by regulation or oversight.

Saviano’s depiction of the Neapolitan suburbs is grimly fascinating reading. Ruled by the clans with near complete impunity, the towns surrounding the port city are both a source of workers and soldiers, a huge open-air drug market and a constant warzone where labour, and life, is cheap. The life of those at the bottom of the food chain—the delivery men, the lookouts, the textile workers, the bystanders—is heartbreaking and compelling, and it’s from their point of view that Gomorrah, a new movie based on Saviano’s book and directed by Matteo Garrone, is told.

Garrone doesn’t attempt to show the big picture. Instead, he follows the lives of a handful of those who live in the world of the System, a series of interwoven but never intersecting tales with no central arc to connect them. There’s the bagman, Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato), charged with delivering weekly handouts to jailed gang members’ relatives, who gets caught up in a clan civil war. Marco and Ciro (Marco Macor and Ciro Petron) are a pair of Scarface-worshipping teenage gangster wannabes who stumble on a cache of weapons.

Roberto (Carmine Paternoster) is a young waste management trainee under the wing of the happily amoral stakeholder Franco (Toni Servillo), who dumps toxic waste on family farms and pays children to operate dump trucks. Totò (Salvatore Abruzzese) is a young grocery boy who joins the ranks of the gangs with an initiation that involves being shot in the chest while wearing a bulletproof vest. Finally, Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo) is a skilled tailor secretly hired by desperate Chinese labourers to teach the tricks of the trade.

You could say that Garrone isn’t telling a story—he’s telling a setting. Their stories add up to a fascinating portrait of life in the Neapolitan suburbs as cogs in a powerful, cruelly efficient criminal machine.

It’s miles away from Scarface—think of it as an Italian equivalent of The Wire, a ground-level portrait of an almost incomprehensibly complex, far-permeating system.

NOT JUDGING: Garrone

FROM THE BOTTOM UP

“I used to see the Camorra more as something with a definite separation between good and bad, without understanding really what is the reason, how everything is connected—the mechanism of how it works, from inside,” says Garrone, sitting in a hotel suite during the Toronto International Film Festival. “In Saviano’s book, it was very interesting to see how the Camorra does business around the world. I think it’s one of the reasons that the book has been published in something like 40 countries, because it’s not just a problem of Naples, but a worldwide problem. It was very important to develop a story that could feel universal.”

You can’t help but wonder how much of this dark business is actually known to most Italians. “We all know, but we know it in a superficial way, how the media portrays it,” says Garrone. “So for me, going to prepare to shoot this movie, to spend six months of my life in that area, was really surprising. I live in Rome—two hours from there—and I couldn’t imagine that two hours from my house there’s a country that’s at war, people who live every day as if they’re at war.

“For me, that was something very surprising. Staying there, you also understand why this mechanism happens. The problem, from inside, and the human conflict—for me, that was the most important story to tell. We decided to tell the story from the bottom up.”

Indeed, Gomorrah’s point-of-view is resolutely ground-level. You never see any bosses, besides some very small-time bigwigs. There are no smoky backrooms, no oily politicians. Running through the film is a conflict that’s barely described or explained—a civil war in one of the gangs based on the real-life faida di Scampia that erupted within the powerful Di Lauro clan.

Though it affects most every character, its intricacies are never described or delineated. “Because it’s not important,” says Garrone. “The war is only important to the journey of the characters.” The point is, for those on the street, these larger power struggles exist only vaguely, as an instigation for violence, territorial control or shifting relationships.

“It’s kind of anti-glamour,” Garrone says of his narrative style. “It was one of the most important things for me, to give a different perspective than other films do. Because, for these people, the models are those kinds of wonderful movies like The Godfather, or Scarface. When they grow up, their models are that, but their reality is different.”

SUBURBAN JUNGLE

Gomorrah takes place in and around a sprawling and bizarre Modernist housing estate, Le Vele, where the characters, live, die and deal drugs. It’s an astonishing building that looks like some sort of crumbling Aztec temple. “It’s kind of a Blade Runner thing,” Garrone says of the movie’s setting. “When I read the book for the first time, it reminded me of some science fiction movies. The characters, the atmosphere. Something very archaic, but also futuristic.”

The film was actually shot there, in the very dangerous area that is its subject. “This is the most important area of drug dealing in Italy, or even in Europe,” says Garrone of the film’s setting. “It’s in Scampia, near Secondigliano. In one of the chapters in Saviano’s book, he talks about the war of Secondigliano”—the aforementioned civil war—“and it’s that area. There are about seven piazzas full of drug dealers, who bring in 500,000 Euros a day. We shot in the real area. It was quite tense.”

“It’s a kind of jungle where everyone fights for survival,” Garrone says. “You can try to escape, but in some way, living there, you’re always connected. You can also be very virtuous and stay out, but in some way you are always connected to it. And that’s what I felt, staying there. Probably if I had grown up there, I would fail in some moment of my life, I would be tempted or make some mistake. It’s very easy to. We were talking about this grey zone, where all is confused. Legal and illegal.”

In fact, Garrone insists that the film does not exist to condemn the Camorra, or its foot soldiers, or those caught in the crossfire. “The most important things that I don’t judge. There is not a comment. I don’t want to tell you what to think. I want to show you how the characters act, their conflict, and also the consequence of their choices. In that sense, it can become moral, but not because I think I have to teach audiences that they shouldn’t become Camorristas. I want to show how easy it is to fall.”

GOMORRAH OPENS THIS FRIDAY,
APRIL 17