Directed by:
Stefano SollimaCinematography:
Paolo CarneraCast:
Greta Scarano, Pierfrancesco Favino, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Elio Germano, Giulia Gorietti, Claudio Amendola, Alessandro Borghi, Lidia Vitale, Yulia Kolomiets (more)Plots(1)
A gangster known as the "Samurai" wants to turn the waterfront of a small town close to Rome into a new Atlantic City. A corrupt politician fond of young prostitutes and cocaïne is protecting him with the help of a powerful cardinal. All the local mob bosses have agreed to work for this common goal. But peace is not to last long, and a ferocious war between the gangs is about to wreck the Samurai's dream. (official distributor synopsis)
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Reviews (11)
Weird movie. Nice stylization, amazing soundtrack (the best of the year!), wild sex and interesting narrative style, but there were a few things that bothered me. The running time is excessive, there is no main character, only supporting characters, and unless I have someone to root for, a movie can't keep me glued to my seat. Violence and action were also scarce here. A decent gangster flick. Probably not my cup of tea. 60%.
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A film blurring the boundaries between concepts such as power, corruption, the church, good intentions, the mafia, usurious gangs, politics, interests, small/large fish, money, etc. Sollima continues in a style he has already successfully used in the Gomorrah series, and so this Gordian knot of destinies from the far side of Rome on the other side of Rome leads confidently and in terms of style towards a complex criminal movie. In this respect it can't deny "gomorrah's roots "(whether book, serial or movie). Like the influence of the duo Tropa de Elite or The Wire. A well-thought-out script (perhaps only the indicated church line was unused and therefore pointless), the actors, the hypnotic camera and the Martinez’s soundtrack, all this is at the highest level. The fact that it is "only" a kind of pilot for the upcoming series. It is a crime series that is one of the best ever created in this genre in recent years. And in this genre department a lot of amazing staff have been done.
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It's safe to say that this gangster film has one of the more conservative audiences, and one can admire Sollima’s fatalistic lyrical approach all the more for portraying a corrupt and crime-ridden environment as an inescapable microcosm where people from all walks of life come together, united by abandonment of moral and ethical values. There are no positive heroes here, in fact almost everyone here is granted a well-deserved punishment, and as such the film accesses the viewer primarily through its mood. To do this, it uses rather atypical techniques, with many scenes lacking spatial exposition, for example. Often a scene is opened with shots of seemingly unrelated activities that gradually build up the space in which the sequence will take place. Which works mainly because those scenes are much longer than usual and, despite that very mood-setting atmosphere, are quite procedural. A perfect example is the supermarket shootout, which is an episode that takes place over four floors of a department store, though its protagonists only meet in one of the shops at the beginning. The extreme long shots occupying the generally familiar interiors of the mall and the civilian victims here straddle that very line between the criminal world and the civilian world. The resulting shape then manages to retain its bankrupt mood despite the revenge finale, because however much evil was punished, it was still just the cog in an ever-turning wheel that, with only minor variations, will continue to function forever.
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Every now and then, I watch something that leaves me speechless. I’m so bewitched – in a good way – that I’m completely smitten. I had this exact feeling after watching the contemporary gangster movie Suburra. The harsh fates of individual characters of different standings are connected by a monstrous construction of a future complex with a casino on the edge of Rome in such a precise way that I was dumbstruck. The directors have skillfully incorporated interesting characters into the vicious cycle of the mafia history and by doing so, they closed an important chapter of the contemporary Italian underground. Some of the scenes were more brutal, some of them less. But all of them were predominated by this disgusting loss of humanity that was always supported by a strange unearthly music of the French band M38 and it amplified the entire story, which felt as if it was happening on a different planet altogether.
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It’s an audio-visually over-stylized, soft-spoken, yet more than eloquent fresco about the dark side of the eternal city that manages a quantum of characters, unprecedented violence, and metaphorical parables. Some of the threads could still use an extra knot at the end, but it is still an intense and exhausting viewing experience in the best sense.
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