Continuing the tradition of strange electives in the recent past, this is from my "World Cinema" class. I compared two films: Gomorrah (Italy, 2008) and Beaufort (Israel, 2007). They both consciously deal with issues of cinematic realism, and the call into question what exactly a war zone is.
Gomorrah and Beaufort: War Films on the Home Front and Abroad
Gomorrah (Italy, 2008) and Beaufort (Israel, 2007) are both war films, the former through the lens of a crime drama, the latter a military drama. They are also both about the destruction of myths: the myth of a glorious life of crime in Gomorrah, and the myth of a glorious life of combat in Beaufort. They embrace grittiness in favour of melodrama, and are both punctuated with extreme, senseless violence. As two films, they complement each other startlingly well, and it is interesting to see how they use different devices for the same effects, and how they attempt to portray worlds that are utterly real.
One of the most obvious ways the films do this is through the visuals. Gomorrah is full of hand-held shots, the constantly moving camera giving the film a kinetic energy. While at times it may offer a visually-striking long shot emphasizing scale (such as the scenes at the quarry or the clothing factory, using symmetry and distance), for the majority of the film the camera is right in the action, unable to capture all of the events happening on screen. When two characters are speaking, instead of the camera cutting between them, it lazily pans left and right as each character speaks, leaving some time spent looking at the empty space between them as we hear the words over top, as the audience tries to understand what is happening in this frighteningly unknown world. The action scenes are even more elusive, with a single camera typically swaying to only give us a glimpse of the action, like in a dream where all the details are fuzzy. By the time the viewer has processed what just happened before them, the story has moved on.
Beaufort is another film that uses contrasting naturalistic and cinematic angles. While there are very striking images such of a soldier coming down a mountain against the sunset backdrop, most of the camera work is unobtrusive. Handheld cameras are startlingly absent in the film, with almost no visual movement at all. This helps establish the mood of the film, which is unlike most war films: the mood of boredom. Even when the shells are falling, frenzy never erupts. The soldiers vacillate between realistic boredom and dread, and the film's look never attempts to emulate the frantic adrenalin-soaked war scenes of Saving Private Ryan. The only time we see real camera movement is when the soldiers are moving throughout the bunker, and the languid trailing movement makes the bunker seem even more dreary and labyrinthine.
Much of the film is spent in the claustrophobic subterranean, with the medium close-up shots keeping the scale intimate. Once and a while it is contrasted with the barrenly beautiful vistas of southern Lebanon – but since to poke one's head out to look out is so dangerous, most time is spent looking at the soldiers tucked away in the trenches, staring at the ground. The views of the soldiers is often heavily framed by the bunker hole they are peeking out of, emphasizing just how trapped they are, figuratively and literally. The colours are very pale, emphasizing the browns of the dirt and the greens of the uniforms, with the sky typically concrete-grey or raining. This contrasts the sun-kissed dryness of Gomorrah - a film that is also rarely lush, but often very bright, sometimes very rich and always striking. Both of the films try to portray the world realistically, stripped of romance, and they both achieve the feeling with different forms of understated looks.
The music is another element that is varying degrees of understated in both films. Gomorrah strikingly uses no non-diegetic music at all. This helps make the film feel less constructed, and also subverts genre expectations. Without any music, the gunfights seem less exciting and cinematic, and the score's silence allows the reverberations of the gunshots to echo even louder. It achieves a similar effect to the TV show The Wire, which uses the same device to add a feeling of realism to street life and the violence. There are no montages, and even though there are five concurrent storylines, there are no clever narrative or editing tricks used to tie them together. 1
The film is absolutely unromantic, the final scene showing Marco and Sweet Pea (killed in an anticlimax without heroism) being carried off by a bulldozer, with no fanfare or emotion as they are held up in the cold iron coffin. This attitude of the film is perfectly encapsulated when we are introduced to the twos, running through an empty warehouse, pretending to shoot guns at invisible Columbians, all while spouting lines from Scarface. The building is empty, their guns are empty, and when Sweet Pea slips into a (strangely out-of-place) bathtub like Tony Montana's, the tub is empty too. This helps illustrate the hollowness of their aspirations and lifestyle. Without any music, the words “I am Tony Montana” echo hollowly and dissipate, and when those boys (or anyone else in the movie) are killed, no time is spend ceremoniously lingering on the event.
Beaufort goes for the same tone of subdued realism, but does not take it as far. The film has a constant undercurrent of music that never takes center-stage (as it may in a Paul Thomas Anderson film, almost becoming a character of its own). The music is ambient electronica, alternating between haunting and dissonant. There is a quiet scene halfway through the film where we hear an actual song – sung by one of the soldiers in the dark bunker. It is sung without any gusto, not on a guitar or piano but a diminutive keyboard, sparse chords played underneath a soft, uncertain dirge. A man is weeping on his cot throughout the song, and it finishes without applause. This seems reflective of the end of the conflict itself, with none of the typical war-movie triumph at the end, but a subdued sob.
Indeed, both films are simultaneously deconstructing our notions of the worlds they are presenting to us. Beaufort does this by emphasizing the boredom of war. It also showcases the senseless destruction and lack of heroism. It is key to note that guns are never fired, the enemy is never seen, and advances are never made. Death comes in the form of a shell falling at random, offering no opportunity for bravery or quick thinking. It is pure chance that decides who lives and dies; who deserves to as nothing to do with it. The soldiers do not talk about their enemy and how much they want to kill them; they just talk about how much they want to go home. The film also deliberately rejects notions of bravado. At the beginning of the film, they bring in Ziv, the bomb disposal expert. He is stoic and careful, yet willing to do his dangerous job. At first I thought the film would resemble The Hurt Locker2, but after Ziv approaches the bomb with great deliberation and care, he is killed before he even has the chance to get to the bomb itself, and do the “red wire/green wire” cutting scene the audience expects. We had assumed that this character was to be the film's protagonist, yet is casually killed a half-hour in. This causes one of the characters to have doubts – what is the point in the conflict? Why did he have to die? It calls into question the Israeli value of military service. The debate is portrayed later in the film between Ziv's father and a television interviewer. Since the action never leaves Beaufort, we are shown the debate on the television, which as a medium reflects the discourse of the society at large, as people all around the country are watching it at the same time. The conversation goes along the lines of Ziv's father saying that he was solely responsible for his son's death in battle, since he should have educated him better. The interviewer points out that in Israel, a son joining an elite military unit is a source of pride, and a sign that they have educated their children well. Ziv's father responds that he wishes he taught his son that his life was more important than that, and should not be wasted fighting in the army. Much of the film feels like it takes place in the First World War, so it is interesting that we see an echo of the debate that occurred during and after that conflict, giving rise to movements such as Dadaism.
Gomorrah is similarly nihilistic in its approach to conflict. Where it differs, however, is the conflation of sex with the violence, as well as connecting violence to juvenile behavior. One of the most striking scenes in the film is when Marco and Sweet Pea find a cache of guns and go out shooting by the water. They are in their underwear, their near-naked bodies infusing their shooting with a vague sexuality, but the cartoon figures on their underwear reminding us that these are just boys trying to be men. This boy/man, sex/violence tension can be seen clearly in a series of three scenes. The first is with the pair playing video games in an arcade, as everyday teenagers might. They then debate the idea of robbing the place, with Marco whining childishly that he does not really feel like it. Once pushed, however, he quickly snaps into the role of violent gangster, with guttural yells and energy to burn. The next scene takes place in a strip club/brothel, with one of the boys being sexually aggressive and borderline violent, with the other scared and subdued for his first time with a woman. We see the compared dynamics of man and boy through two people residing on that undefined line in between. Right before the sexuality can begin in earnest, the boys are pulled out of the club and dragged onto the beach, where they are beaten and left scared and weeping. In a few minutes, we go from violence to sex and back, alternating between swagger and tears. The boys are constantly trying to live in a violent fantasy world, but the violent real world keeps crashing down on them.
Death in both films is handled in a similarly subdued manner. There is no-lead up, no sustained energy, just someone living in one moment and being dead in the next. In Beaufort, we see this when one soldier flips his pancakes on the grill, just to have a shell fall on him and obliterate him before he gets to eat it. In Gomorrah, Roger Ebert astutely points out that “the murders, for the most part, have no excitement and certainly no glamour -- none of the flash of most gangster movies. Sometimes they're enlivened by surprise, but it is the audience that's surprised, not the victims, who often never know what hit them.” Both films reject the notion of a “fair fight”. It is the complete opposite of the end of Scarface, which ends with the most head-on, direct conflict possible.
Both films offer us a small glimpse of what the other kind of life can be: the life of creation. Beaufort offers it us in a small way, through the character of Shpitzer, who sung the touching song. He doubts his own talent and dedication to his art form, but it is clear that he has a fine artistic voice that wants to get out. It is one of the films more manipulative moments when he is killed right after he has sung the song, and talked about his future as an artist. His death emphasizes the tragedy of war, since it deprived the world of another person who can create beauty. In Gomorrah, we have the troubled character of Pasquale, the knock-off clothing designer. He is shown at the beginning to be different from the Camorra organization he is a part of. He instructs the clothiers to create “with love and compassion”, and later “with lots of patience, and love”. He comes home to lie in bed with his wife and sleeping child. His soul is tender, and he is the only character in the film that actually creates something and contributes to the world, even though he is part of an organization that steals. He is betrayed by his boss when he discovers that Pasquale has been trying to make money at the side. After attempting to murder Pasquale, he stands by Pasquale's moving hospital bed. When Pasquale does not forgive him, the final words he offers are “I'll give you a raise!” Pasquale discovers that there is no room for people like him in that world.
That is one of two scenes that emphasize the cold, all-business world of Gomorrah, where money means everything. The other is when the character Franco, whose job it is to bury toxic waste illegally, is speaking to a business acquaintance, who is dying – likely because of the toxic chemicals buried on his land. The old man struggles to breathe, and can barely speak. He is bed-ridden, bound beneath the holy cross in the center of the screen above his bed. One of the few words he manages to get out is “Euro”, which he says several times, referring of course to the currency. The man is a shell, sickened and hollowed out by his pursuit of money, merely cancer covered by a thin coat of leathery skin. It is inhuman, as is most of the violence in the film. It would be different if the gangsters killed for pride, or out of anger, or hatred. But it is just money, just business. Due to this, even though the killing in the film is on an intimately close scale, between men who “used to be brothers” (a phrase used twice in the film), looking each other in the eye as they kill, they are as dispassionate as the mortar shells fired from miles away - because emotionally, that is where the criminals are.
This dispassionate killing in both films makes us question what our definition of war. Strangely, Gomorrah’s conflict feels more like a war than Beaufort does, even though the latter is the only one that actually has a real army. Even though the men in the film are in fatigues, they are not war-like. They never act with any real violence. Even though they carry machine guns for the whole movie, they neither fire their weapons nor demonstrate any desire to. They are always on the verge of falling asleep, even while being shelled. Gomorrah takes place not in a military bunker with soldiers, but with children in their own back yards. And yet those streets are more of a battlefield, and the children are more like soldiers as we would normally think of them. The kids strongly believe in “us versus them”, and revel in conflict. They strive to be brave, and believe in what they are fighting for. Looking at both films together, we can see the contrast of humdrum life on the battlefield in Beaufort, against the warlike life at the threshold of the domestic in Gomorrah. It makes us call into question the nature of conflict, and of violence, and it subverts both our vision of what these two types of life are like, as well as their typical portrayal in film.
Just as real-life informs films, the opposite is true. The interesting thing about crime film tropes is how they have been co-opted by criminals, and made real. Just as film showed the criminal life as romantic, the criminals have started living out these romances as reality, thus the deconstruction of the crime film genre spills over into the real-world. In Roberto Saviano's book, “Gomorrah: A Personal Journey Into the Violent International Empire of Naples”, on which the film was based, he writes about this very dynamic:
“It's not the movie world that scans the criminal world for the most interesting behavior. The exact opposite is true. New generations of bosses don't follow an exclusively criminal path; they don't spend their days on the streets with the local thugs, carry a knife, or have scars on their faces. They watch TV, study, go to college, graduate, travel abroad, and are above all employed in the office of the mechanisms of power. The film Il Padrino, The Godfather, is an eloquent example. Before the film came out, no one in the Sicilian or Campania criminal organizations had ever used the term padrino, derived from the philogically incorrect translation of the English word godfather. The term for the head of the family or an affiliate had always been compare. After the film however, ethnic Italian Mafia families in the United States started using godfather instead of compare and its diminutive compariello, which fell out of use. Many young Italian-Americans with Mafia ties adopted dark glasses, pin-striped suits, and solemn speech.”
This is a chilling demonstration of how life imitates art, and how film tropes that started as fiction can be made real. The very fact that Gomorrah was made into a film adds a Meta level to this, further blending the worlds of life and fiction. For Gomorrah to work, it not only has to embrace realism, but reject film fantasy. Just like Beaufort, it is a film perhaps most noteworthy for what it is not, and for what it eschews. The inclusion of lines from Scarface, and the direct mention of the film by name, makes an eerie dynamic: these are fictional criminals, who are based directly on real people who reenacted the fictional versions based on them. The cycle is circular, the prophecy self-fulfilling, and Gomorrah emphasizes how film and crime are part of the same thing, both interacting parts of a culture, which inform each other organically and symbiotically. They are like the disparate by vaguely connected narratives in the story. To truly achieve realism, both Gomorrah and Beaufort must subvert the typical language of film, and be a conscious rejection of the world of film which they inhabit.
Works Cited
Ebert, Roger. "Gomorrah: Rogerebert.com :: Reviews." Rogerebert.com :: Movie Reviews, Essays and the Movie Answer Man from Film Critic Roger Ebert. Chicago Sun-Times, 25 Feb. 2009. Web. 12 Dec. 2011. <http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090225/REVIEWS/902259991>.
Saviano, Roberto, and Virginia Jewiss. Gomorrah: a Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples' Organized Crime System. New York: Picador, 2007. Print.
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