Story in movies is essential. It is the bread and butter of their final quality in my opinion. Plot can be interesting. Cinematography, music, blocking and so on, are all important ... But when it all comes down, it is the story, the human emotional aspect and the viewer's ability to put themselves in the shoes of the characters, that makes a masterpiece.
Therefore a movie like Gomorrah is seriously challenging, because it does not have an obvious story. Yes there is the superficial, mafia related stuff, which is so "obvious" that I feel confident that the director and the original author of the book, which the movie is based, have more to tell than that.
The way this movie does it, is to put you, the viewer, in the driving seat of creating the story by putting you into the setting and experience it yourself, as if you were a part of it in the first place. The camera is mostly handheld and takes great care to switch between compositional shots to give a feel for the environment and close up's of the main characters in that environment.
There are never any music that reveals what is supposed to happen or warn you beforehand, in a traditional cinematic sense, so that incidents seems to just happen out of the blue, but still make sense after the fact. This supports a enormous sense of fear and paranoia, which is a integral part of the everyday of the individuals living in this area of Italy.
The area in case is what is known as Le Vele, in a section of Naples. In real life this is supposedly a notorious nest of mob dealings, and this alone gives it a serious streak of reality. Add to that a very present sense of being in a different world, in something in between an old stranded cruise ship and an abandoned prison, only inhabited by the poorest and worst kind of scum of "society". It is almost a science fiction like quality.
I would say that it is a misunderstanding to call this a gangster movie. Yes it has a lot of aspects that relate to gangsters and how things "work" in that world. It is at least as much an attempt at putting the viewer into the shoes of individuals who have no future. They literally are without a clue how to make anything of themselves, aside from trying to make their way into the ranks of the mob - with their life on the line. It is like the son of a viking who only have two choices. Take over his father's subsistence farm or go into the viking-"mob" and go rape and pillage
It is hard to pick out specific aspects of the plot, as it is possibly a collage of all sorts of situations and actions, within the frame of Le Vele and excursions of the various gangs who all apparently want to control their "markets" by killing competition. A couple of young men are in more of the focus than others and the thin explicit plot-line revolves around them and their ambitions and eventual nemesis.
The cinematography is very good. It is right up my alley. I love the directors ability to see beauty in what otherwise would be considered awful and as far from art as one can imagine. It is clear that the director of photography and the director was greatly attracted to the Le Vele buildings and their weird nooks and crannies, that helps give the movie its alien feel.
This is in essence an anti-hollywood-gangster movie. it does not in any way have any sentimentality towards either innocent victims or the gangster perpetrators. You are completely on your own in your judgment of both what is really going on and the sense of an explicit delineation of good and evil. This is the kind of movie that separates the average movie fan from the real cinephiles. You are not getting any help in how to understand what is going on, you have to bring yourself into the mix.
The frustration that most moviewatchers will probably feel until maybe the third act, is exactly what the director is going for in my humble opinion. He does not want to tell you what to think and feel and how to judge. You MUST bring yourself into the cauldron and try and live with these people in an alien environment, without a future. If you cannot do that you will not like it at all. It will feel like a stack of different scenes confusingly huddled together. I am not sure the director deliberately went for a kind of post-neo-realism, he is Italian after all, but it is not far fetched to compare it to a movie like "Rome, Open City" at least from a "feel" angle.
I watched it last night and I admit I maybe was a little more tired than good was so I did not get the full value of the watch. But I sure did get the idea of how this works and I am looking very much forward to another watch to get the full benefit, if not the surprises, underway.
This is not a movie for everyone. It is a challenging and potentially very rewarding experience for the one who don't need to get stories force-fed to them but find it a challenge to try and place oneself in the movie and just use it as impressions for the sensation of being in a world that is (I suppose) totally different than what most lives in. I have infinitely more affinity to gangster movies of this type than say Godfather or any other traditional Hollywood spectacle glorifying gang mentality and myth. It has much more in common with Imamura's 1961 "Pigs & Battleships", which I reviewed here a few days ago, than any other gangster movie I can think of just now. It is, if anything explicit, a critique of the collapsing societies of the west. Le Vele is a like a crumpling Roman Empire in a vast open global world. But no one knows and no one seems to care. People have to fend for themselves and create their own life - and clutch at every straw on the way to make it work ... or die trying !
10/10
