It’s very late. My cousin says, ‘Choose a film to fall asleep on the couch.’ I am exhausted, I am sure it won’t be a problem to find a soporific element in whatever will be put in from of my eyes. But when I start browsing Mubi’s library in search for our title, and hope, I spot Dogman and I realise we actually have a chance to see a film and stay awake all through.
As the end credits roll, we slowly regain awareness of each other’s presence while our gaze is still locked on the screen. We are unable to move or blink or speak. No legal dosage of any substance would have given us the same effect, the exact same immobilising experience of my first watch, when I recorded my fresh reactions as follows.
I leave the theatre shaken. I sink hunched and uncomfortable into a velvet armchair at the bar of the Curzon Soho. It is not a prosaic lyricism. I am truly disturbed. I wonder if it shows, ambiguously at ease with the idea it could be so. A gentleman in tweed takes a seat at my table and orders a glass of whisky. I could ask him, but I leave him to a book he’s just extracted with no intent from his bag and the envied solitude of the shortsighted. Maybe it’s the turmoil of my recent state of mind, maybe I’ve got too much caffeine in my blood, or not enough sugar. In fact, I’m hungry. Dogman punched me in a way that cinema rarely has. What to do, stay here for a while, lick my wounds, wash them with the disinfectant that burns the most.
Five years on, watching it with fragmented yet vivid memories, I am immediately enthralled by how Matteo Garrone manages to pin his audience to the seat from the very first shot. Dogman’s opening scene is, in fact, a statement. Its unnerving ambiguity resolves into a sweet moment between man and animal, but the message is delivered—stay assured, there will be blood. As soon as Simone is introduced our fate becomes clear, and is nonetheless frightening. Edoardo Pesce is even more impressive in his role as an uncontrollable thug than Marcello Fonte is in delivering the complexity of his—a dog lover, a coward, a caring father, a criminal?
If the mise en scène of the film strikes as being so distinctive, much credit must be given to the incredible filming locations. The no-place and no-time that frames so sharply the narrative, its almost surreal sense of dystopian misery, only makes the psychological tension more palpable, violent, even toxic.
Among the metaphoric hints nested within the suffocating cascade of events, I am always fascinated by the scene in the picturesque workshop where Marcello gets the coke. There is a particularly disturbing obtuseness in Simone’s brutality as he bursts into the beautiful space, but also an uncomfortable meaning behind the masks the dealers craft as skilled artisans.
Along with those of Gomorra and L’imbalsamatore, these are the worlds and tones and creatures Matteo Garrone is a master in telling us about.
The end music of a film is far from being an ornament—here is a notion that Gomorra made me reflect upon the first time I saw it and one that never ceased to fascinate me.
On a beach immobilised by the setting sun, a front-end loader carries away two lifeless bodies. The disproportion is grotesque, poetic, and metaphoric at once. As the huge vehicle slowly drags our disconcerted stare towards the horizon, an electronic sound discretely chimes in and takes us even farther. Herculaneum, the amazing track written by Massive Attack for Matteo Garrone, springs from the waves gently breaking in the dimming light of the day. Like the sea inexorably deletes any sign on the shore restoring its natural immutability, so its crescendo erodes unspeakable memories somehow echoing the hopeless outburst of Rosaria Costa at the funeral of her husband, killed during the Via D’Amelio bombing—‘but they don’t change, they don’t want to change, they never will.’
Furthermore, as the diegetic shifts progressively to the non-diegetic, Gomorra’s end music doesn’t shout at us that the show is over but rather respects our need to stay with the film a little longer. On the one hand, it feeds the obscure anxiety that the images have left us with, on the other it gives us time to elaborate the bewilderment into astonishment, then disheartenment, perhaps even indignation. Its pulsing beat follows our emotional states creating an exhilarating sense of resonance.
For the sake of recording a couple of notes on the 2021 version, the new edit feels actually better than the original. The film is essentially the same, but the new shots are brilliant and of those omitted are not particularly missed. What really struck me as an unnecessary addition are the many explanatory cards. I found them pedantic and distracting, but more than anything they made me feel patronised—and for no reason. In whatever incarnation Gomorra will always be a miracle act of cinema, but art is not a passive experience and this unexpected redux seems disappointingly to doubt it.
