Movies Features
Italian cinema returns to Cannes
By DPA
May 10, 2008, 14:45 GMT

Rome - When Italy failed to make the cut at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, with no movies from the country chosen to compete for a prize, Quentin Tarantino was not surprised.

'Recent (Italian) films I've seen are all the same. They talk about boys growing up, or girls growing up, or couples having a crisis, or vacations of the mentally impaired. What happened?

'I really loved Italian films of the 1960s and 70s and even some of those shot in the 80s, but now I feel it's over. A real tragedy'.

The US film director was assailed by veteran screen siren, Sophia Loren. 'How dare he talk about Italian cinema when he doesn't know anything about American cinema?' she said returning the serve.

But Italy is back in the running in Cannes this year, with two films: Matteo Garrone's Gomorra and Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo - a selection showing the 'vitality of young Italian filmmaking' the festival's chief, Thierry Fremaux, said.

The films may be showcasing the country's cinematic talents but their subjects reveal some of Italian society's least savoury aspects.

Gomorra - the title refers to the city the Bible twins with Sodom as a centre of vice, and a world-play on Naples' version of the Mafia, the Camorra - is based on Roberto Saviano's best-selling non- fiction novel of the same name.

Il Divo tells the tale of former prime minister Giulio Andreotti whose statesman's stature was tarnished by allegations of collusion with Sicily's Cosa Nostra.

'I don't belong to any movement but certain themes tie me to filmmakers like Paolo,' the 39-year-old Garrone said of the 37-year- old Sorrentino, in an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

While Il Divo's revisits historical links between organized crime and politics, Gomorra confronts the recent underworld ascendancy of the Camorra and the range of its interests, from international contraband in Chinese goods, to toxic waste disposal in Naples.

Images of the rubbish currently piling up in the city's streets have been broadcast worldwide - making Saviano's book, published in 2006, prescient, and Garrone's new film, topical.

But Garrone says his Gomorra - divided into five episodes culled from the book - does not attempt any 'sociological analysis of Naples' situation, nor points to solutions'.

'What drew me to Saviano's narrative is the way it is rooted to the territory it describes,' Garrone said of the 28-year-old author's account of close encounters - the murders, the drug dealing, the sweatshops - with what Neapolitans call 'Il Sistema' the network of clans that control the city and its hinterland.

'I live only a two-hour drive away in Rome, but I discovered a new world, one which I entered as a spectator when filming in some of the locations described in the book,' he said.

Saviano was forced into hiding under police protection following threats from the Camorra, but Garrone says neither he nor his crew faced intimidation.

'We used a working title when shooting began, but everyone knew what we were doing. It's like what Saviano writes in his book: people in those neighbourhoods idolize film culture. They open up in the presence of a camera,' Garrone told dpa.

In particular, Hollywood gangster imagery has influenced the Camorra lifestyle, including Tarantino films such as Pulp Fiction, which ironically borrowed much from Italian crime thrillers of the 1970s.

'What was reinvented to fit fictional film characters, has now been adopted as a model by the real-life Camorristi mobsters,' Garrone said.

He cites the former villa of a top Camorra boss in the Naples suburb of Casal di Principe which was described in Saviano's book and also used as a set for the film.

Modelled on the villa of gangster Tony Montana, the protagonist (played by Al Pacino) in Brian De Palma's, Scarface, it featured the replica bathtub and palatial staircase where Montana/Pacino is shot to death in the 1983 movie.

'The Camorra boss tried to burn it down before he was arrested. So shooting scenes in the ruins was like stumbling around a film archeological site,' Garrone said.