A month of duels: Gomorrah vs. The Sopranos

The mafia ain’t what Coppola made it out to be.

In Gomorrah, a NYFF 2008 selection that is playing July 28 and 29 at the Film Society, you can take a hard look at the poisonous influence of the Camorra mob in a section of contemporary Naples. This is a grittier and more shocking exploration of well-worn territory. The film features Toni Servillo, himself the focus of a series that runs July 27-29.

The well-known Sopranos tweaks mafia legacy in a different way, but over six seasons, revealed the human complexities beyond the Godfather’s high drama.

Mafia movie/TV fans, what do you think? Incidentally, I came across a great exploration of the history of  mob romaticization in the movies and TV in light of Gomorrah’s nuanced rendering via a blog called Kirby Dots. Check it out, and don’t miss the chance to see Toni Servillo in Gomorrah!

[Kirby Dots: Divorcing the Mob: Gomorrah and de-glamorisation of Organised Crime]

Discovering the latest in Italian film–dispatches from OPEN ROADS

With great pleasure, I have been attending the “Open Roads: New Italian Cinema”  festival at the Walter Reade running until June 11th , and will be posting a handful of “festival dispatches” from the seats of the theater for the films I am able to catch. “Please tell me,” said a next-seat neighbor at Friday’s screening of Brave Men (dir. Edoardo Winspeare) “that you aren’t planning to write your report during the screening.” I stow all electronics in the off-position during screenings, and thanks to natural RF shielding in the house of the theater, there is no wireless Internet there to permit me to live-blog (though I’ll admit to live twittering under my jacket at MoMA during ND/NF, sometimes you can’t resist these things).

Now in its ninth year, Open Roads has as its mission to bring the strongest Italian films each year to New York audiences. (This year’s festival is co-presented by Cinecittà Luce.) Given that I haven’t been able to get to Venice, Cannes, or other key venues for launching new Italian films, I depend on this festival to catch me “up to date” before these festivals enter the long and treacherous art house queue for the US circuit. As you never know which Italian films will attract American audiences and which slip through the cracks, I’m eager to see work that might not be available in other American venues this year. (A similar issue that makes FSLC’s Rendez-Vous series, the French film cousin to Open Roads, equally unmissable.)

With Il Divo and Gomorrah attracting such fierce American audiences this past year, it comes as no surprise to find these screenings packed with people hunting for what their across-the-hall neighbors will be watching at the Sunshine or Lincoln Plaza in the fall. So sold out screenings of Brave Men and A Perfect Day (dir. Ferzan Ozpetek) are to be expected, among others.

— Matt Griffin

ND/NF: Houseguests from a polite hell in Mid-August Lunch

From Italian writer/director Gianni DiGregorio (perhaps best known for his screenplay adaptation of last year’s Italian mafioso film Gomorrah) comes Mid-August Lunch, a sprightly comedy (almost Shakespearean in its farcical scope) that blends the viewer’s empathy for rock-and-hard-place bad luck with a bit of charming sentimentality. This film isn’t the gritty Italy of Gomorrah, but rather the small-town communion Italy eternally drenched in summer sun.

Gianni (played by writer/director DiGregorio, a one-man movie-making placeholder in the tradition of Clint Eastwood), for all intents and purposes, is a sad-sack…. He’s behind on rent, has no outlook to pay it on time, and can’t confide his financial woes to his elderly mother, with whom he lives. He’s not without hope, though: his landlord offers to forgive him some of the back pay (and even a key to the building elevator) if Gianni wouldn’t mind putting up the landlord’s mother for a weekend while he is away. Gianni certainly agrees, but the arrangement quickly snowballs…. Not only does the landlord bring his mother, but also his elderly aunt, and all Gianni can do is grin and bear it. And that he does, even more so when his best friend leaves town…. and needs a place for his mother to stay as well.

Gianni’s goodwill and hospitality makes him a one-man host, chef, and maid…. but not without a glass of white wine for himself at the ready. The screenplay is almost aggressively insular to Gianni’s third-person point of view, and this gives the viewer an interesting warm-up to the peculiarities of his weekend houseguests. These ladies, at first humble and grandmotherly (one brings Gianni a cake as gift, wrapped in a bidet towel), soon exhibit enough orneriness to keep things interesting. They gossip, they throw tantrums, they overeat and overdrink, and do it all through the grateful smiles of prudent houseguests.

Gianni’s mother (Valeria De Franciscis), almost playfully dependent on her dutiful son, is always ready to drop some gossipy complaints about their new houseguests to him, yet is sunny and polite to the point of saccharine. (Gianni’s mother, who old age has not treated terribly well, sports a lioness bouffant of a blonde wig against a face so leather-worn and oversunned that she could easily pass as a grotesquerie out of a Cormac McCarthy novel.)

Mid-August Lunch, though, in a way feels almost too easy; the beats on which the story unfolds are cute but not complicated, and I felt that a lot of the tension in a comedy like this came as unsurprising and almost typical of the situation established. In a way, Gianni is the dope who can’t win and can’t say no (a similar comparison, although a bit out-sized, would be Ben Stiller’s character in Meet the Parents), and there’s only so much layering a character like this can have without forcing the story to sacrifice its levity. Whereas the story doesn’t exactly conform to a formula, it does carry with it the dull glint of being derivative…. yet this is a small price to pay for a film that at times is so effortlessly charming.

-Tom Treanor

Buy tickets: Fri Apr 3: 6:15 (FSLC)
Sat Apr 4: 3:45 (MoMA)