10 reasons for avoiding the Iranian film 'Circumstance'

Warning – Spoilers contained

1. The dull and unconvincing lesbian sex scene in bed.
2. The dull and unconvincing lesbian sex scene in the fantasy Dubai hotel.
3. The dull and unconvincing lesbian sex scene in bed (again)
4. The men in the audience who come to see dull and unconvincing lesbian sex scenes.
5. The gratuitous rape scene followed by the victim’s subsequent and immediate desire for the rapist.
6. The men in the audience who come to see gratuitous rape scenes followed by the victim’s subsequent and immediate desire for the rapist.
7. Insertion of one clever scene that plays with the film Milk and gives just one small and incorrect ray of hope that the film might improve towards the end.
8. The sheer difficulty of walking out of the film when you’re in the middle of the Forum cinema in the dark.
9. The frustration that attends a 9 pm screening of said film, knowing that escape will not be possible until after 11.
10. Ok- the last two are self-imposed conditions – I could only come up with 7 good reasons for avoiding this film.

If this doesn’t convince you, the following quote from the Slant website might, although I do not share the writer’s good will regarding the early stages of the film:

These latter acts topple the material full-bore into melodrama, sabotaging the early-going's convincing, compelling feel for youthful insurrection against stifling tradition in favor of more standard, less plausible tensions and conflicts. Casting Iran as a sinister social and political labyrinth designed to ensnare—and thus ensure docile acquiescence from—its female citizenry is no doubt justified, but the twists and turns of Circumstance prove increasingly formulaic and phony, especially once Mehran completes his transition from beaten-down recovering junkie to malevolent monster.

It won the audience prize at Sundance - something to do maybe with the "exotic" tags it has - ticks a lot of boxes...

The syntax of families

It’s easy to forget, from the vantage point of 53, how constant the issue of normality is when you’re 13 or 14. One psychologist I’ve heard reckons that the key universal refrain for teenagers is “Am I normal?” followed, (in my view) by “How do I fit in?”, “Do I want to fit in” and “What will it cost me?” I was thinking about these things yesterday watching the Israeli film Intimate Grammar, directed by Nir Bergman, which focuses on a teenage boy, Aharon and his struggle with these questions.

The film focuses on one family and their interactions, the bitter, abrasive mother, the hapless father and the two siblings, Aharon and his slightly older sister. The title, which I love, forces us to think about the grammar of relationships – of families. The three of us who saw the film together viewed the family differently – because of our own particular family grammar. For two of us, the mother was a pretty horrible experience, for the third, she was like her own mother and therefore interacting within the norms of behaviour. What are the rules in this Israeli family? How do people customarily display love, anger, the need for space?

The film begins in 1963 with black and white footage of Israel’s Independence Day. The larger political situation sits at the outer extremities of this film. It is referenced by characters and omnipresent only in the ways in which politics touches the lives of individuals; the Holocaust survivor’s appreciation of the importance of food, compulsory military service, active youth on kibbutzes. The immediacy of the film is based on its attention to the small neighbourhood where the family live. This small space is riddled with low-level conflict, and neighbourly abrasions. It’s shot in beautiful early 60’s colours like an old Polaroid. It’s claustrophobic in intention, we are squashed around the kitchen table enduring the squabbles, incipient tension and love that is part and parcel of this family. Like Koreada’s films (especially Still Walking), we are forced to be part of the painfulness and the lovely intimate moments that make up this family’s life.

The film is based on David Grossman’s novel. He was interviewed in the Paris Review about this and other novels and said, in relation to this:

I became a more friendly child in those years, more active socially, yet I remained introverted. In The Book of Intimate Grammar there is Aron, a secluded, lonely child, and his best friend Gideon, the all-Israeli boy, who goes out with girls, is in the Scouts, and wants to be a pilot. I modeled Gideon on a friend I had when I was sixteen—I even interviewed him. When the book came out, I sent a copy to him and anxiously awaited his reaction. He called me after some time and said, I liked it and, of course, I found myself. I am Aron. That was amazing to me. If I had heard him say that when I was sixteen, my entire life would have been different. My sense of solitude, of hopelessness, of being totally excommunicated—all this would have been different.

I love this quote. It really distils the experience of being an adolescent. That no one is as wretched as you, as uncool, as un-whatever it is that you have a yearning for. And, unbeknownst to you, everyone around you is feeling the same. Aharon (the Aron of Grossman’s quote) is small for his age. Bergman deals with this theme subtly in the film; it is a preoccupation but not one that we expect will dominate the boy’s life in quite the way it does. It made me remember a Maltese boy I taught in 1983. John was very short for his age. He was, in the parlance of my adolescence “a late developer”. John, a lively, intelligent boy who practised magic tricks on weekends, hung himself in a shed at the age of 17 and a half. I would’ve been about 24 or 25 then – a young teacher – I remember being really upset that he’d given no inkling that the height thing bothered him. It matters, that stuff about body image, about fitting in, about girls and being cool. So what Bergman gives us is a film about difference (newly emergent Israel, life in the cheek by jowl suburbs) and universality. It’s pretty classy.

Wrapping

The contenders for the Foreign Language Oscar in 2008 were The Baader Meinhof Complex, Revanche, Waltz With Bashir, The Class and Departures. Departures, which I saw on the weekend, was the winner. It’s a good film but not in the competition when you compare it with Waltz with Bashir and The Class – both films that I loved and which experimented a bit with form. Both a little more interesting.

Having said that, Departures made me think of my mother, it made me cry and only resorted to sentimentality in the last part of the film. It’s about a very good looking musician (Masahiro Motoki) who becomes an “encoffinator”, a "nokanshi", a professional who prepares the recently deceased for their funerals. The most interesting part of the film is the insights into Japanese traditions and also into contemporary culture. In traditional society it seems that one of the rituals is to wash the body of the dead person in front of the family. This is a highly ritualised event taking place in the tatami room with the kneeling members of the family in rows and the nokanshi at the front, slowly and methodically wiping the body, plugging the orifices and dressing the person in a fresh kimono.

It’s likely that this tradition is dying (sorry) away as the Japanese gradually take on the Western habit of whipping the body away quickly to the funeral parlour. I’m guessing about this after spending some time trying to research what is current in Japan. Departures implies that this is the case. (I found a good description of a Japanese funeral on the website Traditions and customs from all over the world. I also discovered that almost all descriptions of Japanese funerals come from the same source and are repeated word for word all over the web – one writer with a lot of clout.)

The lead actor developed the idea for the film while he was in India. Varanasi is a place where dying is front and centre and the rituals have both a spiritual and a pragmatic edge to them that has quite an impact. The bodies of dead people are placed on funeral pyres and burnt and it is not uncommon to see people bearing the wrapped dead body through the alley ways to the funeral ghat. It's often confronting but real. The film made me think about my mother; I didn’t see her after she died (through choice) and always feel ambivalent about that decision. Film director, Yojiro Takita films the nokanshi scenes slowly and beautifully though not everything is romantised; the first corpse that the fledging nokanshi deals with has been dead for two weeks and is not a pretty sight. It reminded me that I also saw Sunshine Cleaning this year, an American film that deals with the ways in which we manage cleaning up after deaths though this is not its central interest.

Writing in an online magazine Curator, Makoto Fujimura says:

“The Japanese have the ability, and the unwritten code of honor, to make all acts, however mundane, beautiful and refined. There’s no reason why they cannot apply the same principle to acting as they do to every other task. When I was coming back to the airport from Tokyo, I saw several elderly workers clean the elevator belts with sanitized towels because of the flu threat. They had developed the “art” of the belt cleaning, each with a distinctive style. Every subway announcer, Koshien (high school baseball) cheerleader, department store elevator operator, and gas station attendant all take pride in what they do and create unique signature to their “art.”

Japan is also a gift culture, where things are wrapped and presented beautifully. It is a country full of artful wax models of dishes served in restaurants (a welcome sight for gaijin visitors), and anything bought in the stores is wrapped carefully and diligently. So it is no surprise that there is such an art form of nokanshi, a delicate ritual of wrapping the dead.”

This is one of the most interesting things I’ve read about Departures. It connects with what I think of as the introverted nature of Japanese society; the way in which emotions are hidden away too. For example, we are given little idea that the nokanshi’s wife is unhappy in her new home until she discovers what her husband is really doing (she thought he worked in travel) and then she lets go with her grief and anger. Emotions are tightly wrapped; as tightly wrapped as the stiff hands of the dead bodies in the film. There is an artificial gloss on many things. Takita depicts this part of Japan as less glossy and more real. The bath-house, which is clearly slowly dying too, is shabby but comforting as is the place where the nokanshi and his wife live.

In an interview with Takita, he is asked about the location.

“The location should be in wild nature, since the theme relates to "death." I especially focused on snow. [Snow] sometimes looks so beautiful, but at other times, it makes life so difficult. Snow can be a symbol of the difficulty of life. Now, Japan is quite tired, both in Tokyo and in other local areas, in terms of the economy and other aspects. In such a situation, people tend to forget about important things that have been there. As you know, the theme [of the film] is "death," but I wanted to portray fragility and beauty that are fading away. So I selected the Shnai area in Yamagata prefecture for the location."

Fragility and beauty are fading away. In an interview with a contemporary nokanshi, Okuyama, some aspects of contemporary life are highlighted.

“The bodies sometimes reflect the social situation of the deceased. Last spring, Okuyama treated the bodies of many deceased people who had committed suicide by inhaling hydrogen sulfide gas they had created by mixing household chemicals. Last winter, meanwhile, the number of bodies of middle-aged men she dealt with increased. The deceased were dispatched workers who apparently had lost hope and killed themselves after being laid off from their companies, Okuyama said.”

Japan is changing rapidly – like all societies – and there are casualties.

Takita, who also made The Yen Family, doesn’t have quite the same touch as my favourite Japanese film maker Koreada. Departures is no match for a film like After Life. At the end, it succumbs to an unnecessary sentimentality and there’s probably one too many lingering glance. But is a film that takes you places and makes you think about important topics. And made me remember and cry over my mother, whose birthday is would have been on the 26th of October.

Blessed?

Like several films I have seen this year, Blessed begins with images of people sleeping. The faces of the seven teenagers at rest, some in their own beds, one sprawled amongst a few sleeping bodies and two children who are asleep under a bridge. Watching, I thought how rarely I see anyone asleep except the cat. It’s a rare intimacy – the unguarded softened face at rest.

The central theme of this film is the connection between mothers and their children and this plays out in the division of the film. The opening half focuses on the children and is shot in tight close-ups. The latter half is called ‘Mothers’ and the camera angle widens; we see more of each family’s context, both literally and metaphorically.

I wanted to like this film. It’s set in the western suburbs of Melbourne though there are few actual markers of this landscape (Noise, released a couple of years ago, conveyed the physical landscape the west much more potently, as did the film My Year Without Sex, though what these film makers choose to show is quite different). So it’s set in the place I have lived the greater part of my life and focuses on the lives of teenagers. I’ve spent a lot of time with teenagers from the West. I was deeply interested in how filmmaker Ana Kokkinos would represent these things.

The theme is also powerful; Kokkinos talks about ‘that connection between them (mothers and children) is primal, so powerful, and no matter what shit’s going down, at the end of the day there’s that incredible capacity to return to the mother’s embrace.’ And there’s one extended scenes which shows this; involving the Miranda Otto character Bianca and her daughter Stacey. Stacey has been in trouble (I won’t describe what it is) and her mother opens the front door of their house to discover both her daughter and a policewoman. Later, as she shuts the door, she gives Stacey a complicit smile. “I did this once, she says”. It’s a response that should have come after a parental blast about bad behaviour but Bianca is half-pissed and not capable of reacting appropriately. Then later that night, Stacey opens the door of her mother’s bedroom, her mother lifts the doona and Stacey snuggles in next to her mum. Shit goes down, shit is forgiven. It feels real, this scene.

A lot of the film failed to persuade. I think two things were happening. The actors were just a tad too middle class in presentation (teenage girls with perfect skin, neutral middle class accents, delivering lines without the almost essential uplift at the end of each sentence – that badge of teenage girl uncertainty that haunts most kids I know. Drinking bourbon straight. No sign of even getting a bit giggly on it). I wasn’t convinced that they inhabited the same train line as I do. And the other problem with the film is that the large amount of intersecting plot lines means that we never develop a strong sense of any of the personalities. You could sum each character and what happens to them in one or two sentences without omitting much information. Not that this always matters. One of the best films I saw at MIFF this year was Treeless Mountain where there is a similar sparseness of information and plot development. It’s a film about the reverse issue to Blessed; about a mother who effectively abandons her very young children. But in the case of that film, we live through the pain of the young sisters by seeing events at their level, experiencing their attempts to survive and care for each other in a slow and careful script which allows the viewer to spend time with the character. Blessed felt like a gallery of semi-one dimensional “issues”.

The most interesting and believable character in the film is Rhonda (Frances O’Connor). Her young kids leave home and sleep rough for reasons which become obvious in the film. All her scenes are interesting but we find out so little about her that she seems short-changed. If I described what happens to her in the film, it would seem like a paragraph from the Herald Sun about no-hoper mothers and tragedies. Kokkinos is quoted as saying that the screenplay for the film would not hang together until she went back to the core of what attracted her in the first place: a powerful monologue in which single mother Rhonda describes her missing and neglected kids as her “blessings”. “Of all the words in the play, they resonated with me most the first time I saw it,” says Kokkinos. “If you can imagine that, as a filmmaker, there are a couple of key lines in a film that actually continue to hook you in and provide you with an emotional core to keep going, over years, no matter what.” It is a powerful moment in the film but the film goes nowhere with it. We get no further handle on Rhonda. Almost none of her behaviour is in sync with the notion that her children are her blessings yet we get little opportunity to understand why. She’s lost in a kind of film limbo and seems unfair.

I am biased. The films I have come to love emerge from the Neo-Neo Realism school of film-making. In a great article on this genre, writer A O Scott talks about the aftermath of 9/11 and other unsettling global events and what audiences therefore might be been looking for. He/she argues that, rather than necessarily wanting escapism as many pundits thought,

"what if, at least some of the time, we feel an urge to escape from escapism? For most of the past decade, magical thinking has been elevated from a diversion to an ideological principle. The benign faith that dreams will come true can be hard to distinguish from the more sinister seduction of believing in lies. To counter the tyranny of fantasy entrenched on Wall Street and in Washington as well as in Hollywood, it seems possible that engagement with the world as it is might reassert itself as an aesthetic strategy. Perhaps it would be worth considering that what we need from movies, in the face of a dismaying and confusing real world, is realism.”

I guess that many people would argue that realism pervades Blessed. But none of the characters got the time they deserved on screen so they melted into a sort of working class pastiche. A O Scott describes a number of films which fall into the category of Neo-Neo Realism and goes on to say that they serve as an antidote to the wish-fulfilment films of Hollywood.

“Not because they offer grim counsels of despair or paint lurid tableaux of desperation but rather because they take what has always seemed seductively easy about moviemaking — the camera can show us the world — and make it look hard. Their characters undergo a painful process of disillusionment, and then keep going. The disappointment they encounter — the grit with which they face it, the grace with which it is conveyed — becomes, for the audience, a kind of exhilaration.”

The ambitious scope of Blessed allows for neither grit or grace to stick around for long.

Still life with scissors

If I have a reputation for being difficult, it’s because I love the everyday and want to present it. In general people go to the movies precisely to escape the everyday.–Chantal Akerman

1975 was a big year – I finished school and Gough’s government came to an end. At the same time Chantal Akerman was releasing a film called Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. A feminist film. At that time I owned a copy of The Female Eunuch though it was more for the look on my bookshelf than a well-thumbed text. I got into Greer a bit later than this. But I thought of myself as a feminist – and still do.

I saw Jeanne Dielman for the first time on Saturday night. I might not have gone if I’d realised that it was three and a half hours long but it was fabulous. It tracks the life of a widow over three days, at times seemingly in real time, and with about 15 minutes of dialogue in the entire film. Enticing? Oui. (It was set in Belgium and described as a masterpiece of French minimalist cinema. In fact I think every film maker should see it for the quality it has of being experiential cinema. We are forced to endure the tedium of Jeanne’s life as she is living it. We become attuned to small changes in her domestic routine as harbingers of a kind of breakdown. And even though there is one major dramatic event in the film it does not linger as the talking point or provider of residual images. What does linger are the long takes of Jeanne making meat loaf, endlessly pushing and prodding the pink mince until it resembles a large and horrible visceral thing (If ever something was going to send me into a vegetarian state, it would be that scene), or the scene of her washing, endlessly, compulsively or the scene of her sitting in a chair waiting for nothing. For a long time. For a very long time cinematically. We are used now to relentless action as the mode of telling a story; this film shows another way.

Jeanne is widowed and prostitutes herself by day to make enough money to support herself and her almost grown son. Her life constructed and maintained with immense care and precision; as if a light left on inadvertently or a door left ajar will bring everything undone. It’s a film about a woman trapped in the home; trapped by financial poverty and by a kind of limited horizon that seems to be the fate of many women of that time. It reminded me of the flip side of Mad Men, the TV series now playing. All those wives at home going quietly mad. Some 2009 critics have referenced the film Revolutionary Road as a new print of Jeanne Dielman came out about the same time as Revolutionary Road. It’s not a film I liked much, I found it emotionally cold; I felt nothing for the characters. Jeanne Dielman works in a much stronger way because the film forces the viewer to sit with the tedium and pain, the quiet bleakness, the existential meaninglessness and loneliness of the life of main character. It forces you to be in the film, not to just watch which is what it felt like with the Wheelers in RR. One reviewer contrasts the films really well - (not a fan of Sam Mendez either). Kenji Fujishima describes it as “Akerman’s refusal to present easy explanations for her predicament” in contrast to Sam Mendez (in Revolutionary Road) “predictably pins it all on the suburbs and on stifling social codes regarding marriage.”

It has been described as a ‘still life film”. Scott Foundas, writing in LA Weekly, said

“ It is also about repetition and routine as a justification for existence, and
how such things might drive someone mad without anyone realizing it, least of all the person herself. That it was all told from a woman’s point of view, at a historical moment that was not particularly robust for women either as subjects or makers of films, sealed the movie’s status as a classic — albeit one that has been nearly impossible to see for the past three decades. “There was a lot about Jeanne Dielman that I didn’t understand when I wrote it,” Akerman told me in a 2004 interview. “I had a script that was quite precise, but I didn’t even know before I started the first few shots that it was going to be a long movie. After two or three days, I said to the actress, ‘You know, it’s going to be a very long movie.’ But it was not planned.””

The woman who introduced the film described it as a masterpiece of the French minimalist cinema. I know little about this. And there’s quite a bit on the web about her film making techniques including a long essay, written in the 70s by Jayne Loader. It says (the essay) as much about the concerns and language of the times as it does about the film and is a provocative read. Some of it is about technique:

“The most striking formal technique in JEANNE DIELMAN is Akerman's use of the static camera. We see Jeanne's life as if it were a painting which we have all the time in the world to study. Thus we are not manipulated by dollies in or out of space that force us to focus on some particular point of action, or by changing camera angles which hurtle us up or down emotionally. Akerman has said that she saw no reason to move the camera in her film, and for the most part I agree with her: her character's actions speak for themselves.

Since Jeanne is the heart of the film, this is expressed visually by her placement in the still frame. She is centered precisely within it, and unless she moves from one room to another, Akerman not only holds the camera steady but holds the shot as well. There are no cuts except when absolutely necessary, and Jeanne is almost always on screen. Akerman's cinema focuses our attention on her smallest gestures, gestures that reveal character but would be lost in a more flamboyant film: a knife that almost slips when a potato is peeled, a light turned off unnecessarily, a facial expression of disquiet or of frustration, the curious act of making coffee in a thermos in the morning for drinking at lunchtime. The effect of such details, repeated and ritualized, is cumulative. Slowly the portrait is pieced together.

Amazingly, Akerman was only 25 when she made this film. I am in awe of her achievement and her courage and will finish with this quote about it: “Because Akerman's scenario and her realization of it are so provocatively heterogeneous, and because the interpretations of the film's place in the canon of great cinema are so varied (and also because Akerman's editing rhythms and pacing are as methodical and unhurried as Stanley Kubrick's), some have called it the "domestic 2001."

The burbs

The burbs – it’s a naff term isn’t it. Been thinking about the nature of suburban living lately – prompted by The Slap and by the film My Year Without Sex. “Suburban” – it’s onomatopoeic, I think. I read The Slap a few months ago and then my bookclub discussed it. It was interesting for what it brought up for most of us – there was common view that the characters were awful, they were indicative of the changing times but did not reflect the characteristics of the people that we hang round with. I sat there feeling middle aged – it’s the kind of spin I would have despised when I was younger but have to watch it coming off my tongue so readily. Is The Slap about generational change or class? Or ethnicity? Or gender? I thought it began with great promise but lost some of the gloss about half way through. The women characters seemed like a pastiche of the glossy women you sometimes see in The Age, women in their late 30s with hair extensions and a permanent diet. Not quite real. The men on the other hand seemed entirely believable. And pretty awful with the exception of Ritchie and the indigenous man who seems to be there to fill up the ethnic diversity numbers in the book. An indigenous Muslim. Tick two boxes.

What I connected with was the setting. These characters come from the middle ring of suburbs: Northcote, Hampton. People who’ve done OK materially and are aiming to hang on to every bit of it. The kind of people that my sister hangs out with. They have pools and undisclosed sources of wealth. We joke about these coming from drugs but the sources are more likely to be more banal. It makes my sister envious. These people are competitive and use their children as shining little examples of their upward mobility. They attend private schools and toddler yoga. There’s a brittleness to this kind of existence. And in Tsiolkas’ book, a meanness of spirit. The text is a hugely energetic rampage through the suburbs and through this meanness. I don’t see it in the circle of people I know and maybe that means that I live in a bubble. One of the bookclub members, a woman who has a lot to do with schools, said she was at a meeting of principals a couple of years ago and their main issue was that students are coming to school “under-parented” (to quote her). Their parents are giving them fewer boundaries , spending more time working, and want to be friend rather than adult. Her take was that they were relying on schools to do the tough love. This isn’t necessarily what I see amongst my friends though the extended independent/dependent relationship that kids have into their 20s might be indicative of this.

I could write more about The Slap (the sex they are having doesn’t sound like the sex that a lot of my married friends are having) but I might go to My Year Without Sex, a film which is also set in Melbourne suburbia; albeit a slightly less middle class suburbia. It’s a quirky little film, a lighter take than Watts’ previous film Look Both Ways. Funny. Light. Unsubstantial.

Three things about it. The best scene happens early. The main character Natalie (Sascha Horler) is in hospital hovering in and out of a coma. While she is likely to live, it’s a tense bedside scene, the whole family around her. Her son is transfixed by the television screen. We see him with the earphones on, his face tense; he’s watching the Western Bulldogs at the 30 minute mark of a tight game. He’s holding his breath. I’ve been there – in that moment, forgetting to breathe, everything hinging round a kick at goal. Life or death. For him, like his mother – both in life or death moments. Nicely done. Ordinary but utterly important.

They have so much stuff. In a more heavy handed way, this film is a critique of suburban materialism. They exist in family squalor; made more pronounced by the crappy quality of everything they own. They are swamped by toys, clothes, furniture, accoutrements of modern life. It contrasts with the minimalism of the more wealthy extended family that they hang out with – if you’re richer, your stuff is not as overwhelming.

There’s a fascinating spiritual question embedded in this film. It’s prompted me to ask all my religious mates whether they expect to see me once we are both dead. Clearly some of them haven’t thought of this before which is interesting in itself. Worth seeing for the gentle conversation about the need (or not) for spirituality in the suburbs.

My Year Without Sex is about decent people trying to have a go. Like the latest film I’ve seen, Sunshine Cleaning. Not a lot to say about that film. I liked it. Quirky. Good characters trying to make a go of it. Unlike any of the characters in The Slap apart from the teenagers and the Muslims. Does it matter if you don’t like any of the people in a text? I don’t think so but it clearly matters to some; for most of the people who’ve hated The Slap, I think this has been their primary reason. They feel infected by the meanness. Maybe that means that it is a successful novel?

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.