Naples gang film entrances Italy

Italians hate films with subtitles and are accustomed to Brad Pitt, Scarlett Johansson and the rest speaking immaculate Italian for their benefit.

But this month they are making an exception: the new film Gomorra, which won the Jury's Grand Prize at Cannes last month, is on an Italian subject, the Camorra gangs of Naples; but the cast, mostly plucked from the city's streets for the project, speak in Neapolitan dialect which has to be rendered into proper Italian subtitles to make it comprehensible.

This has not deterred film-goers who have been packing cinemas to see it. Freeloaders in Naples have been reported trying to barge into cinemas for free on the basis that they appear in the film. Very Naples, that.

Living in Italy you get accustomed to the fact that there is nowhere else in the peninsula remotely like Naples - thank God. No other city has such an astonishing location, with Vesuvius, the bay, the isle of Capri hazing the horizon. Or such an intense concentration of huge, ancient, pompous buildings, a fusty imperial presence to rival Istanbul or Calcutta. Or such a tragi-comic historical legacy, such an antique sense of self-importance related to the alien and long-dead monarchy, the Bourbons, who ruled the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies up until Italy's unification.

The concept of Italy meant little in Naples. Loyalty to the distant past is understandable: the city's history since unification has been a long saga of unrelenting decline. The recent spectacle of the city's streets clogged with piles of uncleared refuse for weeks on end is merely the latest low.

The Neapolitan lament is that the north has been screwing them ever since unification. The burden of Gomorra is that, while it is true that the toxic waste of the industrial north has been finding its way to illicit disposal grounds around the city for decades, it is the Neapolitans themselves who have been doing it. Gomorra is a film about the self-destruction of a community and the city of which it is an ugly microcosm. It tells a bitter, inescapable truth.

The film's title is a pun on Camorra, the name given to the city's mafia. Nothing more different from the Sicilian Mafia could be imagined. The Sicilians have their blood feuds of course, but recurrently they resolve into solid, efficient hierarchies, spanning towns and families and clans. They have their code of omerta, their sentimental notions of purity and virtue. Since the car bombs stopped in the early Nineties they practically melted away from public life, but they survive and prosper in silence and darkness, extracting their pizzo (protection) from practically every shopkeeper and businessman and enforcing their version of justice.

The Camorra gangs of Naples, by contrast, as shown in the film, are radically anarchic and behave with the chaotic vigour of malignant cancer cells, continually breaking apart and proliferating and invading and destroying healthy tissue.

Like the best-selling book on which it is based, this is a kitchen sink version of the mafia, without a dinner jacket or a horse's head in sight. The setting is one of the dramatically dismal modern housing estates on the city's outskirts, already in an advanced state of decay, and infested by the gangs.

The film describes how the compulsions of crime colonise the lives of people who in a less noxious context would lead blamelessly ordinary lives: a boy on the verge of puberty who runs shopping errands for pocket money but gets sucked into a gang after recovering an abandoned pistol; two young fools who fancy their chances as hoodlums and end up dead; a master tailor who succumbs to the temptation to teach his counterfeiter’s skills to the Chinese, and is nearly killed for his trouble.

The film offers neither hope nor even the illusions of honour or happiness: just dog eat dog. The Italians are lapping it up, subtitles and all. ·