[CRITICAL] SUBURRA

After having long worked in television, and directed the series Romanzo criminal (2008-2010) and Gomorrah (2014-2015), both being sequels to a film adaptation based on a literary work, Stefano Sollima returns to the cinema with SUBURRA, his second feature film. In 2012 he moved to the big screen with A. C. A. B.: All Cops Are Bastards, hard film, and the morals which followed a police unit tasked to maintain order around stadiums, ready to ignore the law to deal with urban violence. If this film bothered him more in his speech than in the realization, classic but relatively well-controlled, SUBURRA , meanwhile, testifies to the difficulty of the director to pull away from the serial format where it comes from, and to find its own personality.

Adapted from the novel Suburrra of Carlo Bonini and Giancarlo De Cataldo, the film by Stefano Sollima immerses us in the Suburra, one of the city’s most disreputable of ancient Rome, where the political world, the Vatican and the mafia make common cause to implement a real estate project for the seaside resort of Ostia, located on the outskirts of the capital. In seven days, the project and the mechanics of corruption and trafficking will be called into question, with settling of scores, attempted extortion, and murders revealed to the big day. A plot simple at first, made even more complicated by the screenwriter, Stefano Rulli and Sandro to petraglia in addition to Giancarlo de Cataldo and Carlo Bonini , and by the realization of Sollima.

Input the director has the desire to be hit by shocking pictures. During a 20-minute very sloppy and difficult to understand from the point of view of the plot, the violent images follow one another, without any real link, not logic. Sex, politics, drugs, religion, corruption, prostitution, murders, it is a series of themes and characters that we all jump in the face at random. Therefore, there will be the mp wormy Filippo Malgradi, the head of a crime family Number 8, and his companion Viola, addicted to drugs, but also a gypsy family and the mafia, the young organizer Sebastiano, or the whore Sabrina… In this set, it will not be really the religious presence and especially the evocation of the Pope, except possibly to emphasize the fact that corruption affects the highest levels. An element not really necessary since never developed to influence the story.

“The whole SUBURRA is relatively agreed upon, even superficial, Stefano Sollima has recourse to artifices.”

Although the following the film end up find sense, these first few minutes are symptomatic of the main problem of SUBURRA and its director. This last, want to touch on too many topics, rather than just a basic, but honest, movie-of-mafia, is lost completely. His attention to major from his approach in the manner of a tv series – that you could accuse its writers, and the lack of recoil as it is assumed in the original work. Sollima separates his film into blocks (the use of the seven days, reinforcing this idea), marking and delineating the sequences to each other by a timeline and a pace laborious. Such a roller coaster, SUBURRA pass sequences aggressive that nothing brings really, other slower, for purpose of explanation, but without real mastery. It is not very surprising, in view of the result (but also the success of the movie in Italy), a television series based on the film, produced by Cattleya and Netflix, in collaboration with the Rai, in preparation. A format that would certainly have agreed more to the four writers of the film.

The experiment proposed by the developer, thus, becomes quickly annoying. As if he was constantly seeking the image that will be able to mark the spectator – this sex scene in three, which ends with the deputy Malgradi urinating outside on his balcony in the rain is, ultimately, that falsely memorable and falls in the facility.

The whole SUBURRA is relatively agreed upon, even superficial, Sollima has recourse to artifice. Such as the use of music at a sound level far too high, which stifles the image instead of the accompany, and the purpose of which is to rely on elements, where the staging does not. In the end, apart from a few flashes in scenes of shootings – one in a supermarket, where Sollima sets up a palpable tension even before the first shots, through his use of scenery and setting, the other by putting us in the skin of the junkie Viola (Greta Scarano, who manages to get out of the lot), in full trip in time to watch helplessly in a settlement of account. SUBURRA is a disappointment, that even the presence of talented actors that are Pierfrancesco Favino (Romanzo criminal the film, A. C. A. B.: All Cops Are Bastards, Rush) and Elio Germano (My brother is only son, La Nostra Vita) could not save.

THE OUTPUTS OF THE DECEMBER 9, 2015

AT the HEART OF The OCEAN, A + A, SEA VIEW, SUBURRA, BELLE AND SEBASTIEN, BACK HOME …