I’ll have to check out Manufactured Landscapes. I think I remember that being on your best of the year list one year.

I was riveted, fascinated and apalled by the world Garrone was showing me — and challenged, of course, given the style and narrative complexity. The movie is certainly hard to follow, but I admire the way they keep it confusing. It was based on an Italian bestseller, after all, so they no doubt assumed local viewers would have a certain familiarity with the details (from the book, from headlines, etc.). Still, I think it’s fair for foreigners to criticize it for being somewhat impenetrable.

That reminds me of something Two Lovers director James Gray told me in a recent interview, articulating the idea that one of the most important things for a screenwriter to do is distinguish between being ambiguous (which he strongly encourages) and simply being unclear (for which he finds no excuse). Gomorrah doesn’t fill in the details for you, but it certainly gives you enough to go on.

In my case, reading the book certainly helped. In it, Saviano describes how a designer gown that ends up on Angelina Jolie’s back was actually made by Camorrah-controlled tailors in Naples. Hence the Scarlett Johansson bit.

The kids driving the trucks didn’t strike me as funny, and the book makes it even more horrifying: Basically, the materials they’re exposed to are so toxic that adults refuse to do that job, but kids can be coerced to do it, not realizing that they’re destroying their lungs and radically decreasing their life expectancy in the process.

If you found the locations beautiful (I did, too, but not in a way that made me envy those stuck living in them), I strongly suggest you rent Manufacturing Landscapes, a mesmerizing documentary about a photographer dedicated to documenting man’s imprint on the world (enormous factories, mounds of trash, strip-mining cavities and the building of the Three Gorges dam). I could watch such landscape shots for hours (my favorite in Gomorrah is the abandoned gas station, with the guy peering up from the underground tank).

What I hoped to convey with this story is how Gomorrah can’t help but engage with the Hollywood gangster movie tradition, but ultimately owes more to Italian neorealism. Some friends and I are watching every foreign language Oscar winner since the category was introduced (Gomorrah sadly didn’t make the cut this year), which means we’ve had the good fortune to revisit Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine and Bicycle Thieves recently.

Shoeshine, which is nearly impossible to find on video these days (and not yet on DVD in the U.S.), could easily be one of the five threads in Gomorrah, tracking the mistreatment of street kids thrown in a juvenile detention center. In De Sica’s movie, it is the prison system, not the kids who are most in need of reform. It’s an eye-opening experience, and Gomorrah was the same for me.

That all said, you caught my attention and made me click, so consider that objective achieved.

Because the movie was so confusing for me, to the point where I often didn’t even know who a character was or what he was doing, or what was happening to him or why, I wasn’t emotionally invested. I didn’t know enough about any of the the characters to feel bad for them. All I knew is that for one reason or another, they got mixed up with the mafia in some way. So rather than be tragic for me, the movie played as absurd.

Teens firing guns on the beach in their underwear - it’s not sad, it’s absurd. Little kids driving giant trucks of toxic waste down a quarry - again, that’s kind of funny if you don’t know how bad the kids’ lives are, which you don’t here. You can use your imagination and assume they might be street urchins, but all the information we have is kids in trucks, which is amusing. A woman with a monkey in a cage, maybe the monkey is a symbol of something, but for me, it was just adorable.

The movie intentionally doesn’t give you a character to root for, partially because there’s too many characters to keep track of; it’s consciously distancing, which is fine because I found the movie engaging despite that (I liked watching this strange world, even if I didn’t know what was happening), but as a consequence, none of it seemed horrifying to me.

I admired the energy of the kids who seem to want to start their own mafia (even though for a time I was confused and thought they were the rebels fighting the main mafia family), but when they hold up an arcade at the spur of the moment because they ran out of money there, it wasn’t depressing to me, just absurd. And by absurd, I don’t mean laughable. Just absurd in the sense that it’s interesting to watch people do inexplicable things. They are directionless, which is unfortunate, but we don’t know enough about their circumstances to bemoan them. We just know what they are doing in the moment, which seems ridiculous.

There was no Bene from City of God here. After I saw City of God, I was upset about Bene for weeks. His death meant something to me because he was such a likable character; he had a good heart and plans and the world got him before he could get out. Here, there wasn’t even a potential Bene. The one “good” character is the only one who is able to make a clean get-away, because he’s upset about peaches. True, it had been building up for him. But the crazy woman in the backyard and the peaches were the turning point for him. I liked that something so simple could cement his realization, but tragic it wasn’t.

Most of the problems here seem to be self-imposed, except the people who get cancer by being next to the toxic waste, which we only learn about in the ending titles.

The toxic waste subplot was the most confusing for me. What did this have to do with the mafia? Who was the man dying on the bed? All I knew is that that there were a bunch of barrels in a giant beautiful gorge, and kids were driving them there because the other truck driver got toxic waste on him, and let’s face it, he didn’t seem too badly burned.

Kids honking at each other for no reason other than that they are kids driving giant trucks of toxic waste - I couldn’t help but chuckle at that.

And though the lives of the characters are all pretty miserable, the misery wasn’t unrelenting. There’s even humor, like with the kids driving the trucks. I guess that could be sad if you look at it the right way. But the kids were having a good time. And that quarry was actually quite beautiful; even the toxic waste barrels looked kind of nice there.

It wasn’t like I found Amores Peros to be, which was pure agony for me. Maybe after seeing Johnny Mad Dog at Sundance - 90 minutes of child soldiers in Liberia shooting and raping everything in sight - anything else seems like a pleasant vacation. Italy here didn’t seem like hell on earth to me. A lot of the scenery was gorgeous — I loved the forest where they had buried the guns, as well as the beach where they fire the guns. Even the run down apartments were kind of nice. Even City of God, which was wildly stylized by comparison, I felt to be much more disturbing.

Also, the characters seemed to have a good amount of freedom to avoid the paths they chose. Not that everyone deserves what happens to them, but it seems like most of them could have avoided getting mixed up in the mafia business if they chose to. The one guy who has a crisis of conscience is able to just walk away. Sure, he has to walk all the way home, but I feel that in other movies, the guy who tries to turn over a new leaf usually gets shot. I had heard that this movie made the mafia seem like it was in every layer of society, but I didn’t get that impression at all. There seems to be one actual business that is affected, the clothing business. Also, we get no sense that the police may be involved at all. At one point in City of God, the whole town becomes a war zone. That never really happens here. The streets are squalid but relatively safe.

And consider the kids who stole the guns. (*Spoiler alert*) They don’t kill a single person, even with all their talk. And yes, they get killed in the end, which is predictable, but they were given a surprising amount of leeway. They easily could have avoided death if they weren’t complete fools. The mafia boss didn’t seem all that brutal. There’s no real sociopaths like Pesci in Goodfellas here.

I hated Italy when I visited, but Gomorrah made me want to give it another chance.

You’re definitely right about there not being much context. As much as I enjoyed the individual scenes, when the movie was over, I realized I had no clue what had happened. Who were the people killed in the tanning salon? Why was that guy handing money out to people? I know, they were involved with the mafia at some point in some way, but who is this woman with her son on one side and husband on the other… do we ever see the husband? Why she blamed for the guy’s death? And who was the guy who died that she got blamed for (I thought it was the kids who stole the weapons, but later saw they were still alive)?

Who was this war between and why were people forced into different sides? Why exactly is this tailor attacked? What was the significance of the scene of Scarlett Johannson on TV? Does it all make sense when you see it a second time?

I didn’t mind not knowing what was happening exactly, because I liked the scenes themselves. But afterward, my movie date kept asking me about various characters and who they are and what happened, and I was unable to answer any of her questions.

As you mention, the screenwriter had to trim down the stories to fit them all into a movie. I think he should have trimmed out more so he could have fleshed out a few of them into coherent narratives. I’m guessing the movie makes a lot more sense to Italians, and people who read the book.

Nevertheless, it is the rare movie that worked for me even though I didn’t think the story worked. I liked it from moment to moment, so I can’t really complain, even if it didn’t add up to much for me. It didn’t really have to make sense because I found the characters fascinating to watch.

Best foreign film of the year, though? Not sure about that. But I can’t think of any others off the top of my head that I would put up there to replace it.

- Show quoted text -

I tip my hat to Karina. It’s a catchy headline — made me laugh — even if the movie comes off sounding more sordid than it deserves.

To set the record straight, Gomorrah’s the best foreign-language film to get a commercial release last year (it ranked #4 on my 2008 top 10), and I hope my enthusiasm comes through in the piece.

and

“In the world of the Camorrah, no one can outrun his fate, and when executions do happen, the victims aren’t canonized in the operatic fashion of Scarface, but rather treated like so much garbage in need of disposing.”

So…how is the headline misleading?