Gomorrah and the doings in Ascot Vale

I am a big Sopranos fan but have long thought it belonged with The West Wing as a study of power and family rather than a focus on organised crime. I think this is because we grow into a kind of affection for Tony Soprano which is at odds with what he really does that is brutal and ugly and evil. Seeing the Italian film Gomorrah has confirmed my thoughts about that. Gomorrah focuses on the ordinary people who willingly or not are caught up in the workings of organised crime in contemporary Naples. It’s about evil, entrapment, poverty and corruption, following five stories of people who, unlike Tony, have little power and authority. One film critic describes it like this: “Gomorrah is the mob movie as postapocalyptic warning, shot with dark precision inside dingy and overcrowded apartment complexes whose crumbling concrete and peeling paint make a mockery of the beautiful landscape outside” and in the New York Times: “no dark jokes; no catchy pop songs; no film allusions; no winking fun; no thrilling violence”. The violence is there all the time in the background, like a horrible sort of tinnitus, not in the forefront of the action.

Gomorrah works on a suburban level. The characters we meet are the kids on the street in Sunshine, the guy who runs the sweated workshop in Maidstone, the collector for the organised crime who operates out of a café in Union Rd Ascot Vale. The café where I buy good home-made tagliatelli to cook at home. In the film, we see the “western suburbs” style housing commission area of Naples. It’s grimy and claustrophobic; everyone seems to know everyone’s business. Unlike Melbourne, these areas of Naples are really run down; people are living in considerable squalor.

The film intertwines the stories of about five sets of characters. My favourite character is the master tailor. He is a middle aged man who has great skills within his trade but, for inexplicable circumstances, is running a sweatshop of workers who are running up designer clothes that will be sold on at very high prices. At one stage, we see a TV shot of Scarlett Johansson wearing one of the gowns. In moonlighting for a Chinese businessman, the tailor’s skills are finally appreciated by the workers he is teaching to make couture clothes but we as an audience are rightly filled with a sense of doom as he goes about his work. He is an ordinary man, attracted by the idea of making more money; the beauty of the film is that we meet him mid story with no idea of how he became involved with the sweatshop business. It is normal.

Two teenage characters help carry the film; they are gangster wannabes who carry out a serious of crimes in defiance of the local crime overlords. They are hapless and stupid boys, full of machismo and adolescence. I’ve taught heaps of them. Some of the kids I taught in the west have ended up in organised crime; some were young apprentices of their older brothers, uncles and dads while they were still at school. A natural kind of trajectory for them, like the kids in Naples. But most of the kids I taught had more options.

Here in Victoria, I think we see organised crime as something that happens to other people; it enables us to follow the stories of the Morans with amusement rather than fear. The Underbelly series has increased the theatricality of what is essentially a world of boguns and lowlifes. In Gomorrah, it seems to overlay life for everyone. Roger Ebert describes it like this:

“You watch with growing dread. This is no life to lead. You have the feeling the men at the top got there laterally, not through climbing the ladder of promotion. The Camorra seems like a form of slavery, with the overlords inheriting their workers. The murder code and its enforcement keep them in line: They enforce their own servitude.Did the book and the movie change things? Not much, I gather. The film offers no hope. I like gangster movies. "

The Godfather" is one of the most popular movies ever made -- most beloved, even. I like them as movies, not as history. We can see here they're fantasies. I'm reminded of mob
bosses like Frank Costello walking into Toots Shor's restaurant in that
fascinating documentary "Toots." Everyone was happy to see him: Jackie Gleason, Joe
DiMaggio, everyone. At least they knew who he was. The men running the Camorra
are unknown even to those who die for them."

I was struck by one thing particularly. Three cultures appear in the film: Italians, Columbians and Chinese. In each case its a bunch of guys sitting around, drinking coffee or smoking drugs (the Columbians). Deals are being done but there is a sense of leisure. Time to talk and chew the fat, eat good food. The women are elsewhere. Not running organsied crime. Occasionally the recipients of the proceeds of organsised crime but more often the widows and mothers worried about their kids. Would the world be different if women were running things? Would there be a Gomorrah? I don't know but I'm grateful I'm not a poor woman in Naples.

In its lack of sensationalism and hype, this is a terrific film.