After a Grand Prix at Cannes as well as showings at Toronto and Telluride, Gomorrah/Gomorra screens at the 2008 New York Film Festival prior to theatrical release. This subtitled Italian 137 minutes contains five stories that overlap in character, action and setting, and lists six writers, including director Matteo Garrone and Roberto Saviano, who has lived under carabinieri protection since the publication of his 2006 fact-as-fiction bestseller.

In grainy color and grubby locations, the film is appropriately cinéma vérité style, with faces haphazardly cropped at uncommon angles and darkish interior foregrounds backed by out-of-doors overexposure in grey-skied sun. Raw and visually powerful, notes Garrone, he and DP Marco Onorato caught their subjects “in as straightforward a way as possible, as if passer[s]by who happened there by chance.”

Characters themselves are not quite aware what the goal is or who’s on what side. In the pictured Neapolitan districts of mass killings and mass profits, money emerges as a perk, but in this organized crime world into which people drift or are recruited, actions are dictated most of the time by a code of maintaining face. One is with us, or against us; there’s no  hesitation, so the merest suspicion of a cross-purpose must be avenged because, without questioning, “it had to be done.”

SPOILER ALERT

Willy-nilly those involved -- including women -- stay involved or are whacked without personal rancor and, despite film blood, without the camera-caressed gore that audiences expect. Small fry who want out are intimidated or exterminated, though here, too, the will to power seems, not merciful, but random. Head tailor Pasquale del Preto (Salvatore Cantalupo), for example, who -- as much for admiration as for cash -- sells fashion secrets to competing Chinese immigrants, survives an ambush ending in a cemetery and turns to driving a long-distance rig rather than risk life, wife and baby again.

Given a scarce job in unconscionable waste disposal as personal assistant to Franco (Tony Servillo),  university graduate Roberto (Carmine Paternoster) quietly observes strikebreaking children and the crucifix effects of buried toxins, and he walks away from it on a rural highway. Instead of the usual strong-arm, his boss can think of nothing more damning than routine, “Go make pizzas!”

“Brother” is bandied about, as “brother-in-arms” in these openly acknowledged turf wars that are chillingly real and, generating an annual hundred fifty billion Euros, have also claimed ten thousand lives in three decades.

Much is set in and around a low-income ziggurat of a housing project.  Bespectacled CPA-looking Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato) keeps records and his own counsel, walks the surreal-but-real passageways of the complex, listens to complaints as he hands over inadequate hush money to families of prisoners and, threatened and shot at, cannot get out.

His father in jail, in spite of the concerns of his mother thirteen-year-old Totò (Salvatore Abruzzese) moves from delivering groceries into gang membership which quickly turns from a heady rush into a nightmare.

“Sweet Pea” Marco and Ciro (Marco Macor, Ciro Petrone), pathetic dimwits, lend the only moments of grim comic relief here. They play-act movie gunman on a sickly beach and later cannot find their own marker for the hidden arms. They are caught in the cycle of criminal activity and revenge where one lives the animal life of hunter and hunted. Survival is rare and random and not necessarily for the bad or for the relatively good.

With heavies rather than outright villains, with no heroes, Gomorrah is set into a concrete location and situation but also speaks of what exists all over. Unlike its characters, who are victims, it does not take sides, its referenced culture hero Tony Montana no more than a celluloid fantasy. Big-bellied and stubbled or adolescent and smooth-faced, these frightened frightening people and the story they enact are defined by a direct camera technique which makes them flesh-and-blood, not larger-than-life spectacle.

(Released by IFC Films; not rated by MPAA.)