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Rating: The camera, like the human eye, scans the passage of bodies on the horizon. Bodies that are shadows, boundaries, shells eroded by the world's decay. Obscene bodies, beautiful, deformed, retouched, but what's inside cannot be seen. With the guts removed, they can be filled at will: new skeletons of wire, new flesh of cotton, new glass eyes, and all around the same appearance, the same shape. Immutable and eternal bodies. Bodies full of death.
Peppino is a fifty-year-old dwarf, an expert taxidermist who systematically cooperates with the Camorra: he stuffs corpses with cocaine and transports them around the country. A mean and antisocial life, deeply contemptible. Valerio is a charming young man, of blinding but innocent beauty. Too tall and too smiling for this dull and dirty life. Anguish and enchantment, attraction and repulsion, gratitude and ingratitude tie the boy to the dwarf with a double thread. Peppino pays him to be part of his collection of bodies: he offers him an apprenticeship job, welcomes him into his home, becomes his lifeline, his inseparable companion. Peppino is attracted to Valerio. He wants to possess his beauty, to embalm it to keep it intact over time; he gives him attention, gifts, certainties, and organizes orgies with prostitutes just to secretly brush against his desire: so different, so complementary. Valerio remains stunned and dazed in front of the inexorable emptiness of his existence. He seems not to ask and not to ask questions. He seems incapable of being a man and of living.
Then a trip from Campania to the heart of the Po Valley and here is Deborah: attractive, foul-mouthed, and irritable. The other side of the triangle. The crossroads. On one side, a world of perverse pleasures, of easy vices in the shadow of his ineptitude and organized crime; on the other, the dullness of petty-bourgeois everyday life, at home with her parents, in a frowning and dull Cremona, where the fog and the prospect of becoming a father are the future existential condition. What to choose?
Perhaps life (understood as beauty and above all as its inconsolable pursuit) which in all three sides, however, coincides with lies, compromise, with the resigned impossibility of being happy.
In a Caserta paralyzed by illegal marshes and garbage, where even the sea seems like a huge carcass, Garrone puts everything of himself at the disposal of the film, his overwhelming ideas, and his Body. An endless proposal of captivating visual stylemes is what strikes the spectator from the first scene: improbable close-ups, sudden cuts, the use of dollies and sketched sequence shots (as in the frequent dialogues between Peppino and Valerio, with that incessant rising and falling of the camera) capable of producing intense and impactful images. Even the words, sometimes almost incomprehensible in their tight Campanian terminology, succeed in provoking that aura of estrangement and problematic nature that one stubbornly (and cruelly) tries to emphasize. Almost impeccable in this sense is the performance of Ernesto Mahieux, alias the Embalmer: a role that fits him perfectly, where he manages to bring out the fragile, obsessed, and corrupt ambiguity of the character with absolute skill.
At his fourth work, Matteo Garrone takes the main road that will lead him to the pinnacle of contemporary Italian cinema. And he does so by not limiting himself to directing a film: with the camera on his shoulder, he chooses to taste the scene, there, constantly amidst the actors, to live the dialogues, the moods, the images. The final result is to be praised not only artistically: sequences that fully transmit their meticulous preparation (the colors, the photography, the movements) and at the same time denote a spontaneous and ambitious spirit of improvisation, in search of a seductively naturalness unknown to recent tricolor cinema.
Not only Gomorrah.
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