decades, it is the Neapolitans themselves who have been doing it. Gomorra is a film about the self-destruction of a community and the city of which it is an ugly microcosm. It tells a bitter, inescapable truth.

The film's title is a pun on Camorra, the name given to the city's mafia. Nothing more different from the Sicilian Mafia could be imagined. The Sicilians have their blood feuds of course, but recurrently they resolve into solid, efficient hierarchies, spanning towns and families and clans. They have their code of omerta, their sentimental notions of purity and virtue. Since the car bombs stopped in the early Nineties they practically melted away from public life, but they survive and prosper in silence and darkness, extracting their pizzo (protection) from practically every shopkeeper and businessman and enforcing their version of justice.

The Camorra gangs of Naples, by contrast, as shown in the film, are radically anarchic and behave with the chaotic vigour of malignant cancer cells, continually breaking apart and proliferating and invading and

destroying healthy tissue.

Like the best-selling book on which it is based, this is a kitchen sink version of the mafia, without a dinner jacket or a horse's head in sight. The setting is one of the dramatically dismal modern housing estates on the city's outskirts, already in an advanced state of decay, and infested by the gangs.

The film describes how the compulsions of crime colonise the lives of people who in a less noxious context would lead blamelessly ordinary lives: a boy on the verge of puberty who runs shopping errands for pocket money but gets sucked into a gang after recovering an abandoned pistol; two young fools who fancy their chances as hoodlums and end up dead; a master tailor who succumbs to the temptation to teach his counterfeiter’s skills to the Chinese, and is nearly killed for his trouble.

The film offers neither hope nor even the illusions of honour or happiness: just dog eat dog. The Italians are lapping it up, subtitles and all.