When I first arrived on the internet, one of the first people I exchanged e-mails with was a man who turned out to be a rather ardent supporter of the Italian political party Lega Nord.  Now an integral part of Italy’s ruling coalition, the Lega Nord’s tendency towards populism and racism has fuelled fears of an Italian relapse into Fascism.  The Lega’s supporter I corresponded with once complained “why should I pay for those brown-skinned bastards singing in the sun?”.  The ‘bastards’ in question were not gypsies or asylum seekers or any of the other traditional scapegoats of the European right but Italians who happened to be from the south.  Arriving ten years too late for a witty riposte, Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah — based upon a critically-acclaimed work of investigative journalism by Roberto Saviano — suggests that the answer to the Nordista’s question is that, clearly, nobody has been paying for the people of southern Italy as Garrone’s Naples is a decaying. almost post-apocalyptic wasteland passed over by globalisation, abandoned by governments and ignored by the Church.

A success at the British box office thanks, in no small part, to some heavy advertising playing up the film’s non-existent thriller aspects, Gomorrah is not an entertaining film.  It is not a film that you will be quoting to your friends on the way home, nor is it a moving ‘emotional roller-coaster’ full of ‘compelling characters’ and spectacle.  It is a film that asks questions of its audience while giving them very little to hold onto.  In fact, it is so defiantly inhospitable that it seems to have been put together with the explicit goal of avoiding ‘entertaining’ its audience.  However, scratch the surface and think a little bit about what is going on and the rewards are astonishing as Gomorrah does not only take a hatchet to the conventional crime film, it also lands a number of very well-aimed jabs at the nature of capitalism itself.

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