(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Suburra
Directed by Stefano Sollimas
NB! This movie review contains reveals of the film's action.
Stefano Sollimas Suburra is a different mafia movie – dark, dystopian and without hope. Evil has prevailed, and so the film is also without heroic policemen and righteous investigators who fight the good cause in the name of the law. That's how it has been.
The word suburra literally means "under the city" and is historically Rome's oldest poor quarter. Here Julius Caesar grew up; here Christianity took root after his death; Here are some of the oldest churches next to the oldest brothels in town. When I moved into Suburra in 1978, our street, Via dei Capocci, was divided between garages where stolen cars were sold, and brothels where new and regular customers came and went practically around the clock. The girls were often abused, raped girls from southern Italy, many of them single mothers who sold sex to put up money for a new life for themselves and the children they had with them.
Everyone voted communist. Our mayor, Luigi Petroselli, built 20 apartments a year. He built schools, kindergartens where everything was free, sports facilities, swimming pools and libraries that, year by year, literally lifted the poor out of the dirt. His cultural director Renato Nicolini closed Via Fori Imperiale for traffic on Sundays, so that we should have a place to stroll with our strollers. Then they showed Eisensteins The armored cruiser Potemkin on big screen at Circus Maximus and hosted Estate Romana, an international festival with free concerts, theater, film, and exhibitions and cheap food and wine. Crime went down wherever the Communist Party had power.
Two million Romans accompanied Petroselli to the tomb when he died in the fall of 1981. Such grief over having lost his leader and protector had not seen the city since the imperial era.
But then it was also over. During the 1985 election, Petroselli's successor Ugo Vetere lost to Christian Democrat Nicola Signorello. Soon after, it became known that the election had been fixed. Following the pattern from the Sicilian elections, the mafia had purchased forty billion liters.
If you talk to people who remember what Rome was like in 1985, they just shrug their shoulders and say: There is not a single honest politician left. All are bought and paid for. I will never forget how the leader of the Christian Democratic Party, Ciriaco de Mita, during the parliamentary elections two years later in 1987, scornfully rejected the Communists' demand for honesty with these words: Who votes for an honest person? Only fools do it.
If you talk to people who remember what Rome was like in 1985, they just shrug their shoulders and say: There is not a single honest politician left. All are bought and paid for.
Through Corrupt. And it is this joy of undermining the population's belief in the good in man, to turn them into conspirators in the criminal corruption game that suffocates the city today, which is the underlying drama of Stefano Sollima's dystopian film. He describes this hopelessness by depicting organized crime from within. The story is like in the TV series Gomorrah, seen through the eyes of the criminals, and gives us on the one hand their ruthless struggle for territory, and on the other hand the ruthless looting that unites them in the attack on the political institutions. And as always, the church – which in exchange for its share of the pie has laundered drug money for the mafia since 1945 – is good for their evil. In this picture, the Vatican appears as a black hole where the oligarchs control the criminal underworld from within through inviolable gray eminence, without ever being seen.
The special thing about Sollima's direction is the icy realism in the film language itself. The film has no political agenda, but Sollima still becomes a politician because he reveals how the oligarchs in the Catholic nomenclature, with their control over the political institutions and the mafia as hird, undermine democracy. The deadly violence becomes so real and comes so close to us that it causes physical discomfort.
Unscrupulous. The plot is simple. The mafia wants to transform Rome's ancient port city of Ostia into an Italian Las Vegas, and puts the king of the Roman underworld Samurai to lead the project. His liaison in Parliament, Filippo Malgrado, is leading the effort to buy the votes needed for the government to pass a law giving them Ostia on a plate.
Malgrado is a criminal politician by the grace of God. To show his contempt for the political system, he stands and pees in the square in front of Parliament from his balcony, while one of the prostitutes he has just used – a minor girl – dies of an overdose of crack in the bed inside. In affection, he scolds his friend Sabrina for crying, and leaves the removal of the body to her before he runs away.
Sabrina calls in despair to the only one who can help her, the gypsy Alberto Anacleti, who is also the brother of the leader of the Magliana gang Manfredi. It's going to be fatal. Alberto is an ambitious and greedy upstart in the criminal environment, and uses the body to extort money from Malgrado. Malgrado in turn puts Aurealiano Adami to scare Alberto for himself. Adami is a local gang leader from Ostia who likes to burn down the premises of those who do not want to sell to him, and crushes their legs with a sledgehammer to get them to sign the sales documents. Instead of scaring Alberto, Aurealiano kills him with a precise stab wound to the throat.
Orgy of consequences. This triggers a gang war where everyone – and that's the moral Sollima gives us – gets what they deserve:
The resigning government, and not least Benedict XVI, who abdicates as pope. Malgrado, whose rib of political immunity is being held accountable for his misdeeds after the body of the young girl he killed, is found. Manfredi, who is given as food to his own bloodhound by the pimp Sebastiano – as raw revenge for Manfredi forcing him to pay the debt after his father. And finally Aureliano, who is killed by Samurai because he refuses to submit – before Aureliano's girlfriend Viola unexpectedly appears out of nowhere and kills him again. The execution, which takes place in torrential rain in the middle of the night over the drain in an enclosed flooded atrium courtyard where his blood disappears in the gutter, is portrayed as an exalted, almost religious liberation that puts the drug addict Viola in the light of justice.
Suburra is an important film. It shows what awaits us up there with politicians who, for the sake of power, give in to those who are drowning the world in poverty and war.
Suburra shown in Norwegian cinemas.
Øhra has lived in Italy for 17 years, and is a journalist and author.
