Director ~ Marco D'Amore
Writers ~ Leonardo Fasoli, Maddalena Ravagli, Marco D'Amore
2019, Italy-Germany
Stars ~ Marco D'Amore, Giuseppe Aiello, Salvatore D'Onofrio
Robert Saviano’s book ‘Gomorrah’, about the Neapolitan Mafia the Camorra, is an outraged diatribe against the influence organised crime has on ordinary citizens, the fashion world, etc, etc. There is a section about how the gangsters started imitating films; for example, how a female gang started dressing like The Bride from Tarantino’s ‘Kill Bill’, or how one crime lord wanted a bath like Pacino’s in ‘Scarface’. There is perhaps no better symbol for Saviano’s disgust than when he reports that he pissed upon that bath when researching.
The Italian TV series very loosely based upon the book is more soap opera, but despite lots of garish often tasteless jumble to symbolise wealth, there is never the sense that these people are happy or joyous. There’s little showboating because they’re too busy being morose, plotting and grim to cosplay films. There is little glamourisation of the lifestyle. Soap opera miserabilism helps to convey that this is not a life of contentment: after all, for all the garish trimmings, nearly everyone ends up dead.
Since the look and feel of the series ‘Gomorrah’ tended towards the cinematic by nature, this spin-off film resembles an extended episode, but for that there’s no disappointment. This film is directed by its star, Marco D’Amore, so the look and feel is of a piece. The show stuck to its staples: people facing-off constantly; men glaring into each other’s faces, close enough to kiss; women quite often toxic and enabling; men swaggering; women crossing their arms disapprovingly; occasionally characters will decry their lot or swing between declarations of loyalty and angst. Our main man Ciro (D’Amore), for example, says little but occasionally laments his existential loneliness and lack of feeling. Occasionally, the actors get to flutter vulnerability and lost humanity on their faces; and sometimes it is unintentionally amusing as posturing tends to be.
This spin-off tells the tale of what Ciro was doing while season four was taking place, the difference being that we get flashbacks to when he was a little proto-gangster orphan shit. It’s not a show with much sympathy, being more fascinated with the politics and betrayals with a little weepiness over male bonding. If the crucial ingredient with Ciro is that he was a mystery (but don’t cross him), then the flashbacks perhaps attempt to give him some context or motivation, but it also reaffirms that he was always thus and no crush on an older girl is truly a redeeming backstory.
Marco D’Amore continues smouldering as Ciro and his work as director on some of the episodes, and this certainly doesn’t scare the horses or go any deeper. This doesn’t have the outrage of Matteo Garrone’s original film, nor, for example, the deconstruction of machismo, mythology and fighting that Kinji Fukasaku’s ‘Battles Without Honour and Humanity’ series, but ‘The Immortal’ follows the format of the series. You won’t get the moral challenges of ‘The Sopranos’ or the jaw-dropping facts of 'Narcos'. But as with the series, most of the cast are scumbags so guilt levels and empathy is not a high demand; the betrayals are thick and occasionally surprising, the turn-over is high, the pace swift, the locations of backstreets and alleyways are excellent, interspersed with beatific panoramas of the city.
It all makes for diverting gangster soap and this film fills in the last jigsaw piece from the series.
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