A meditation on violence.
Gomorrah (or Gomorra) is crushing, because it does not need to crush. From the opening scene in the tanning salon to the last shot of a backhoe carrying bodies aloft, this film is a languid meditation on the power, and powerlessness, of violence.
It is this meditative quality which is so difficult to analyze. There is a scene in the airport where two principal characters, a corporate criminal and his protege, meet the protege's father. The father is overwhelmed with pride in his son's success. The two principal characters leave the father, but the camera doesn't follow. It lingers on the father as he wrangles his emotions. It one of many beautiful and a counter-intuitive framing decisions in the film. One expects that kind of work from a director/cinematographer. But the director of Gomorrah was Matteo Garrone, and the cinematographer was Marco Onorato. What could the director have said to the cinematographer to produce this luxurious, non plot-driven camera work? I couldn't figure it out. I brought Giles Nuttgens, the cinematographer for Water, Swimfan and my film Saint John of Las Vegas, to see Gomorrah. He couldn't figure it out, either.
We found our answer buried in the end credits. The director was listed as the A camera operator. So the film's look and feel benefited from the collaborative director-cinematographer relationship. But the instantaneous choice of frame was instinctively the director's.
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