Gomorra, Sanguepazzo

The biggest release by far over the last couple of weeks in Italy has been Matteo Garrone’s Gomorra, which also went down a storm at Cannes. It’s a modern mafia story, which seems to have been influenced by Alejandro González Iñárritu in the way it weaves together several interlocking tales. Acted largely by a cast of unprofessionals, it sounds like it mixes neo-realism and poliziotesschi and is definitely one to look out for. Fortunately, all the acclaim should mean that it gets an international release. To quote from the IMDB reviewer:

Based on Roberto Saviano’s best seller ( over 1.000.000 copies sold in Italy ), this movie is an inside look at Camorra’s underworld in Naples, depicted as a sort of modern Dante’s Inferno. Children and young guys are involved in a merciless, cruel struggle for life and blood money which has caused over 3.600 dead so far which is a bigger slaughter than the others committed by different criminal organizations in Italy and elsewhere. Five stories from Saviano’s book have been chosen and told through a few professional actors and a lot of real people that never stood in front of a camera before. A heavy, gray sky hangs over these sleazy landscapes as if the beauty of one of the Italian lands of the sun had fled and the moral darkness had taken its place. Go watch this unconventional masterpiece as soon as it’s released somewhere in your area.

Garrone, by the way, is a former tennis payer who’s been making interesting films for a good few years now (see First Love (2004) and The Embalmer (2002)). This could be the one that makes his name outside of Italy.

Another interesting, albeit very different, new release is Sanguepazzo. This is set during the second world war, and follows the last years of a couple who find fame in the White Telephone movies produced by Mussolini’s Salo Republic. This is actually based on the true story of Luisa Ferida and Osvaldo Valenti, both of whom were executed by partisans in 1945.

This sounds fascinating, and is of considerable interest for anyone with an interest in Italian cinema, dealing as it does with the chaotic Salo period, when film and fascism were closely tied. Monica Bellucci and Luca Zingaretti star, while the director is Marco Tullio Giordano (another acclaimed Italian director whose profile is tiny outside his home country).

Inevitably, as well as these productions there are also a bunch of lesser films. Gli ultima della classe is a kind of update of the old Edwige Fenech / Gloria Guida ‘Sexy Schoolteacher’ films, in which a hapless student (Andrea De Rosa) is assigned a private tutor, Barbara (Sara Tommassi), and the two of them reach an unlikely agreement: if he does his homework on time, she’ll take off her clothes! Hmmm.

Chi nasce tondo, another comedy, sounds even less inspiring: a pair of numbskulls search for their missing grnadmother, whose gone AWOL from her care home. This had met with a pretty return at the box office, and bearing in mind that Italian audiences normally lap up this kind of rubbish that really doesn’t bode well. On the positive side, the cast features some old favourites: Sandra Milo, Glauco Onorato, Tiberio Murgia.

Il nostro messia is yet another self referential film about a filmmaker’s trauma making their new film. Cue much exitential angst. Yawn. This took about €2000 over the weekend of its release, which means it would have been seen by about 200 people. I can take comedies, but this kind of crud just makes me mad: put the money into something that people may want to see rather than this kind of film school onanism, please!