Shattering myths of the ‘Godfather’ life

In the film “Gomorrah,” a young, would-be mobster amuses his friend by reciting Al Pacino’s lines from “Scarface” inside an abandoned villa that eerily resemblances Tony Montana’s lair in the same movie.

“That villa was built by a real big boss who is now in jail,” says director and screenwriter Matteo Garrone. “He gave to the architect a tape of ‘Scarface’ and said he wanted it exactly like Tony Montana. It’s amazing.”

If there’s a certain fun-house mirror distortion blurring the lines between reality and fiction in this scene, it’s all the more powerful because Garrone was trying to make a movie as truthful as possible about the reality of organized crime in southern Italy and how it permeates every fiber of society in the province of Naples.

“I was interested in showing a different point of view than ‘The Godfather’ or ‘GoodFellas,’ ” he says. “These movies are the models for these people, but their real lives are different. We wanted to develop the confusion between reality and fiction. They act like they’re in an American action movie.”

“Gomorrah” is a pun on the Camorra, the crime network centered in Naples, where much of the movie was shot on location. A gritty, documentary tone strips away every vestige of style and glamour usually associated with both Italy and mafia movies. None of the actors has a face that would ever land a Hollywood role. Most of the action takes place in housing projects, bleak factories or seedy clubs. The characters even dress badly, wearing sweat pants and American sports jerseys. It’s the rare Italian film that makes you not want to go to Italy.

“The movie I think has a kind of anthropological value,” Garrone says. “It was important to reinvent the imagery of the criminal without glamorizing. We chose very carefully every face in the movie. There are other parts of Naples that are beautiful that other directors will show.”

‘Very strong images’

“Gomorrah,” which won the Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, opens a one-week run in Los Angeles on Friday so it can qualify as Italy’s official entry for the Oscars. The film is scheduled for wide release in February.

The movie is based on a bestselling book of the same name, written by Roberto Saviano. “I read the book a few weeks after it was published,” says Garrone, who was in Los Angeles recently for a screening. “I found the book powerful, also visual with very strong images and characters, and different from all the characters I saw in mafia movies. I said, ‘Maybe we can try to make a movie different from all the mafia movies and shot from inside.’ ”

There have been plenty of Italian-made movies about the mafia, including 1986’s “Il Camorrista,” directed by Giuseppe Tornatore (“Cinema Paradiso”), but few filmmakers have taken such a rough yet panoramic look at the subject. So far, “Gomorrah” has been the seventh-highest-grossing movie of the year in Italy (and the third highest domestic film).

How authentic is the film? Two cast members whom Garrone discovered on location have been arrested for extortion and other mob-related crimes. Saviano himself went into hiding in 2006 shortly after Garrone enlisted him as one of the six screenwriters for the film. The international success of his book and his continued attacks against the organization earned the author death threats and police protection.

“In the film we tried to bring everything out,” Saviano says by e-mail. “It was important to work on what the book didn’t show, but whose presence is strongly felt. With the film it’s a little like having had the chance to rewrite ‘Gomorrah’ a second time, taking off from the same stories to be able to add details that weren’t useful to the narrative but that became fundamental to rendering it on film.”

The movie, Balzac-like, follows five different stories that take place at the same time but never quite connect. There’s Don Ciro, a Camorra functionary who finds himself caught between warring factions; 13-year-old Toto, who delivers groceries in a slum and drifts toward the only promising career he can see; Marco and Ciro, the wannabe thugs who mistake life for a mob movie and discover there’s no happy ending; Roberto, a college graduate who winds up in the toxic waste business; and Pasquale, a tailor who learns the hard way that even the garment trade is controlled by organized crime.

“In the book, there were hundreds of stories and movies,” Garrone says. “We decided to choose characters from the bottom. Instead of telling the story of the boss, tell the story of the slave. We decided to have five characters, each leading to a different theme. It was very important that this theme could be universal, not just connected with the local problems of Naples, but global.” The idea for the structure, Garrone says, came from Roberto Rossellini’s 1946 classic “Paisa” -- “a masterpiece.”

Much of the movie was filmed in Scampia, a suburb north of Naples. “We went to shoot in the real area,” Garrone says. “It’s very important to give the feeling that these characters lived in a sort of claustrophobic world, like a jungle, a closed ecosystem. It’s important to understand how people get involved in situations that could be devastating. One of the most surprising things was to discover how when you go inside how difficult it is to understand what is good and bad, black and white, how much gray there is. If you grow up there, it’s easy to make a mistake.”

Developing a visual sense

Garrone, 40, grew up in Rome. His father is a theater critic, his mother a photographer. Garrone went to art school and spent several years making figurative paintings and running a disco bar before turning toward film.

“I worked as a camera assistant,” he recalls. “I found a natural passage from painting; both are visual. I’ve done six movies and two documentaries. The first three were very small; that helped me to understand better how to make cinema.”

Garrone says that he had some worries venturing into rough neighborhoods to film but that residents generally seemed thrilled that someone wanted to tell their stories. “I want to give to the audience the feeling of being inside, being close to these characters,” he says. “It was important to become invisible as a director.”

The movie still clocks in at 2 1/2 hours and the Neapolitan slang is so thick that even in Italy the film was released with subtitles. None of which seemed to bode well for commercial success. “The producer was very worried,” Garrone notes. “There are no heroes. There is no happy ending. Probably the audience felt something true, something real.”

--

calendar@latimes.com