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TREELESS MOUNTAIN AND GOMORRAH

Treeless Mountain (So Yong Kim, USA/South Korea): 41

For fuck's sake plant something. In Between Days didn't exactly feel sui generis, but Kim's take on adolescent fumbling and dislocated yearning was nonetheless distinct and nuanced, predicated upon characters and situations that were both archetypal and slightly off-kilter. Without puberty to confuse various issues, however, she goes on autopilot -- this is just Child's-Eye 101, a bland rehash of Nobody Knows (though here the kids are dumped with a mean aunt rather than wholly abandoned) that dutifully hits every sad-little-moppet trope known to world cinema. Representative maudlin touch: Before she bails, Mom gives her two daughters a piggy bank (literally in the shape of a pig! when did you last see that?) and tells them that every time they obey Mean Aunt, they'll receive a coin; when the bank is full, Mommy will return. If you can't fill in the next half hour of the movie, you haven't been watching many Iranian films over the last decade or so. Kim certainly has.

Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, Italy):54

Remarkably similar to The Wire in its method, slowly and patiently assembling a vast, dizzying mosaic that examines the Camorra's effect on every aspect of Neapolitan life, as seen from every rung on the region's socioeconomic ladder. Thing is, though, The Wire, for all its undeniable brilliance, took a good five or six episodes just to get rolling in its first season, and that's twice as much time as Garrone has to work with here. Consequently, a lot of this material feels sketchy, skeletal, undernourished; of the five individual stories that eventually emerge, only one -- the proud tailor who sells out to the Chinese -- manages to transcend its schematic function and grab you on a visceral level, thanks largely to that actor's exceptional performance. Furthermore, Garrone's stubborn refusal to contextualize anything, while theoretically admirable, results in serious confusion for the determined tabula rasa viewer (viz. moi), who won't have the slightest clue what the hell is going on with these apparent turf wars (I had to look it up on Wikipedia afterwards), and who may not even fully understand, until the expository closing titles, how the haute-couture and waste-management strands are related to all the criminal activity, since we're never explicitly told that these are Camorra-backed businesses. Plenty of memorable images, including a housing project that rivals the one in Import Export for frightening dilapidation, but the entomological approach and general absence of humanity -- no Bunk or Bubbles here -- makes Gomorrah something of a grim slog. Really, the title and the first few minutes tell you everything you'll ever know.

Posted on 09/06/08 by: dangelo 01:17 PM