Non-election post!
Oct. 4th, 2008 08:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malsperanzaSee? I can put down the bottle Any. Time. I. Choose.
Went to see a screening of Gomorrah last night at the NY Film Festival. I read the book this summer and thought it was amazing. The movie is pretty amazing too, in a different way. I recommend both strongly, though what I've seen of the English translation of the book does not do justice to the beautiful prose, which borders on a kind of magical realism.
The book has been discussedby the Wu Ming folks. (I wish I could link to the written form of this talk, but it's only in Italian and French.)
At a minimum, the movie has unbelievably brilliant acting. Breathtaking. The audience was stunned when the director(Matteo Garrone) said during the Q&A that the performers were all trained actors, not "found performances" a la De Sica or Rossellini. Comparisons to Italian New Realist film will be legion, but this is a more artful and tricksy kind of filmmaking, a bit more disingenuous.
I was worried about the movie. I'm usually happiest with a film adaptation of a book I love when the film doesn't try to capture the book too directly. The book interweaves dozens of individual stories of people entangled in the Camorra or affected by it as well as personal meditations on the Camorra and Naples, and a number of set-pieces of straight (or apparently straight) reportage. On Chinese knockoffs and the vast Chinese exports into Europe. On toxic waste dumping. On the influence of American gangster movies on the tastes of Camorra captains. The whole book is written in a prose that flows fluidly from objective reporting to lyrical musicality and back again. Add to this that it is a work of extraordinary heroism: the author names names and cites sources, and is now living under permanent police protection, with a Cammora fatwah on him.
The movie takes just 5 of these stories and tells them in a generally neorealist style, making no attempt to replicate the lyricism of the book. Handheld camera, ambient sound, no soundtrack (but lots of the cheap Europop music that infiltrates working-class Italian life in bars, cars, and discos. In this sense (and also in the towering performances of most of the actors) it does have much in common with The Bicycle Thieves, Mamma Roma, and I Vitelloni. Gommora is full of indirect citations to that film tradition, even as the characters in the movie make their more direct citations to Scarface, The Godfather, Kill Bill, and Goodfellas. Gommora never panders to the viewer; it takes its time explaining who the various people are and what they're doing, and lets the viewer fit together the various threads as best we can. (Having read the book, which makes these clues more explicit, I didn't find this troublesome, but I bet there will be complaints that it's confusing and obscure.)
The writing is subtle (and mostly in a Neapolitan dialect that requires subtitles for most Italians). At one point, early on, a father arranges for his grown son to get a job with a successful businessman. Unemployment is high, and both father and son are grateful. The father explains that he works in a hospital, but he can't get his son a job there because he doesn't have the right connections. "What part of the hospital?" asks the businessman, making small talk. "Intensive care," the father says. "It's a hard department to work in, very hard." We think no more of this--Intensive Care is a tough gig, with lots of very sick and dying people--and we don't see the father again. But later, when central characters start turning up in the emergency rooms and morgues of the area, the offhand comment resonates in a different way.
One thing the movie does especially well is to capture the visual setting of the book. In this movie you will get nowhere near the beautiful bay of Naples, nor the great historic old neighborhoods of the city (though the Camorra is rife in many of them. This is a landscape of abandoned gas stations and half-built houses started by scam developers on the periphery of the city, desolate marshy farmland at the edge of urban wasteland, litter-strewn beaches, squalid apartments and sweatshops in small, drug-infested towns where native Italians live uneasily with African and Chinese immigrants.
Perhaps the real star of the movie is the insane, sordid, futuristic Fritz Langian housing project known as Le Vele. Built in the early 1960s in the same progressive spirit as Chicago's Cabrini Green, Le Vele is infamous both for its utter collapse and corruption and for the bizarreness of its fantastical architecture and immense scale. It's one of the strangest things I've ever seen, the closest thing I know in real built architecture to Piranesi's nightmares.
And yet, if it had been well-built and well-maintained, it might have been seen as a masterpiece of mid-century modernism. But like Brasilia and so many grand projects of the flush 1960s, it is wildly, impossibly out of scale. There were originally 4 buildings, but 2 have been demolished. Among other things, they are full of asbestos.
Most recently, since the election of a rightwing racist and quasi-Fascist government in Italy, the area near Le Vele has become an official camp for the housing of Roma (gypsies).
Anyway, go see the film when it gets into general distribution. And read the book.
Went to see a screening of Gomorrah last night at the NY Film Festival. I read the book this summer and thought it was amazing. The movie is pretty amazing too, in a different way. I recommend both strongly, though what I've seen of the English translation of the book does not do justice to the beautiful prose, which borders on a kind of magical realism.
The book has been discussedby the Wu Ming folks. (I wish I could link to the written form of this talk, but it's only in Italian and French.)
At a minimum, the movie has unbelievably brilliant acting. Breathtaking. The audience was stunned when the director(Matteo Garrone) said during the Q&A that the performers were all trained actors, not "found performances" a la De Sica or Rossellini. Comparisons to Italian New Realist film will be legion, but this is a more artful and tricksy kind of filmmaking, a bit more disingenuous.
I was worried about the movie. I'm usually happiest with a film adaptation of a book I love when the film doesn't try to capture the book too directly. The book interweaves dozens of individual stories of people entangled in the Camorra or affected by it as well as personal meditations on the Camorra and Naples, and a number of set-pieces of straight (or apparently straight) reportage. On Chinese knockoffs and the vast Chinese exports into Europe. On toxic waste dumping. On the influence of American gangster movies on the tastes of Camorra captains. The whole book is written in a prose that flows fluidly from objective reporting to lyrical musicality and back again. Add to this that it is a work of extraordinary heroism: the author names names and cites sources, and is now living under permanent police protection, with a Cammora fatwah on him.
The movie takes just 5 of these stories and tells them in a generally neorealist style, making no attempt to replicate the lyricism of the book. Handheld camera, ambient sound, no soundtrack (but lots of the cheap Europop music that infiltrates working-class Italian life in bars, cars, and discos. In this sense (and also in the towering performances of most of the actors) it does have much in common with The Bicycle Thieves, Mamma Roma, and I Vitelloni. Gommora is full of indirect citations to that film tradition, even as the characters in the movie make their more direct citations to Scarface, The Godfather, Kill Bill, and Goodfellas. Gommora never panders to the viewer; it takes its time explaining who the various people are and what they're doing, and lets the viewer fit together the various threads as best we can. (Having read the book, which makes these clues more explicit, I didn't find this troublesome, but I bet there will be complaints that it's confusing and obscure.)
The writing is subtle (and mostly in a Neapolitan dialect that requires subtitles for most Italians). At one point, early on, a father arranges for his grown son to get a job with a successful businessman. Unemployment is high, and both father and son are grateful. The father explains that he works in a hospital, but he can't get his son a job there because he doesn't have the right connections. "What part of the hospital?" asks the businessman, making small talk. "Intensive care," the father says. "It's a hard department to work in, very hard." We think no more of this--Intensive Care is a tough gig, with lots of very sick and dying people--and we don't see the father again. But later, when central characters start turning up in the emergency rooms and morgues of the area, the offhand comment resonates in a different way.
One thing the movie does especially well is to capture the visual setting of the book. In this movie you will get nowhere near the beautiful bay of Naples, nor the great historic old neighborhoods of the city (though the Camorra is rife in many of them. This is a landscape of abandoned gas stations and half-built houses started by scam developers on the periphery of the city, desolate marshy farmland at the edge of urban wasteland, litter-strewn beaches, squalid apartments and sweatshops in small, drug-infested towns where native Italians live uneasily with African and Chinese immigrants.
Perhaps the real star of the movie is the insane, sordid, futuristic Fritz Langian housing project known as Le Vele. Built in the early 1960s in the same progressive spirit as Chicago's Cabrini Green, Le Vele is infamous both for its utter collapse and corruption and for the bizarreness of its fantastical architecture and immense scale. It's one of the strangest things I've ever seen, the closest thing I know in real built architecture to Piranesi's nightmares.
And yet, if it had been well-built and well-maintained, it might have been seen as a masterpiece of mid-century modernism. But like Brasilia and so many grand projects of the flush 1960s, it is wildly, impossibly out of scale. There were originally 4 buildings, but 2 have been demolished. Among other things, they are full of asbestos. Most recently, since the election of a rightwing racist and quasi-Fascist government in Italy, the area near Le Vele has become an official camp for the housing of Roma (gypsies).
Anyway, go see the film when it gets into general distribution. And read the book.
