There was a moment in season two of Italian mafia drama Gomorrah when it seemed the show was lost: when Genny Savastano threatened his mortal enemy (and the man who killed his mum) Ciro di Marzio with a 3D-printed gun he’d smuggled past both customs and the other mafioso guarding Ciro, but then didn’t kill him. The show – based on Roberto Saviano’s 2006 expose of the Camorra, which earned the writer lifelong police protection – was having its plot-shock-crazed cake and eating it.
It seemed as if having sprung 100 plot curveballs in the first run, the film-makers had to turn to people not dying as the biggest source of surprises.
I was worried that the second series, which ends tonight, couldn’t keep up the standard of the coruscating first run that took several days off my life. I was also worried they’d struggle to develop the characters without sacrificing authenticity. My anxiety seemed justified by the fifth episode, when the tension had been largely frittered away on loose plot-lines and overblown dramatics. The characters were in danger of becoming shells. But just when it seemed the show was a bust, it rediscovered its panache and has nicely set up a series climax in which the entire mafia clan is up for grabs.
The less said about the first two episodes the better. In the first, Ciro strangled his wife to death in a scene that was almost majestically misplayed. This is a series in which people lie gurgling in their own blood for what seems like 20 minutes at a time, yet Deborah died almost absent-mindedly, like a cigarette being stubbed out, while Ciro hammed it up like a mafioso Michael Crawford. The next episode flashed forward a year, as if trying to get as far away as possible from the shame of that scene. We found Genny fully recovered from his near-death experience at the end of series one, now hanging out in the Honduran jungle, making lifelong friends with coke suppliers. He returned to Europe to meet his father, Don Pietro, who was hiding out in a German industrial town, overseeing a petrol-running racket. After some exceptionally dubious plot developments, Pietro abandoned Genny to return to Naples in the boot of his friend’s car.
Things looked up when, back in Naples, Conte – the supremely self-controlled villain, prone to bouts of literal self-flagellation – was revealed to have taken a femminielli lover and be wrestling with his sexuality; but that ended – badly for him – soon enough. Then we were back in the Genny-Ciro drama, the pair taking another trip, this time to Trieste, to try to kill each other/try not to kill each other.
Gomorrah improved markedly once it abandoned its pan-European pretensions and returned to its comfort zone in and around the Secondigliano slums. By the sixth episode it was back on track, a far more confident beast when introducing characters only to violently kill them off than when trying to emotionally develop the ones it has been forced to let live.
As Genny and Pietro stepped back a bit, and Ciro tried to keep his shaky alliance of hoodlums from falling apart, they laid off the gratuitous plot twists and settled for taking the viewer on a voyeuristic rollercoaster of the local feuds. Sure, it remained prone to the occasional ridiculous detail – a midnight meeting of the camorrista in a graveyard was a highlight – but the show’s licence was stronger when it stayed in the shadow of the Vele di Scampia. Perhaps this is also true of the gangsters, who seem, despite their riches, unable to get away from the ghetto that bred them.
It’s not that there hasn’t been decent character development. Both Genny and Ciro have shown a new weakness for family life – Ciro’s overshadowed by his unfortunate wife-murder, but his love for his daughter is very real. With the two enemies now having something to live for, you would normally expect them to die. And yet they seem essential to the series. There’s a clear hierarchy of death-defying for the protagonists: if a character can die, they will; if they are useful to the plot, they’ll just be wounded or arrested; if they can’t die no matter what, they’ll get a gun to the face, prove they’re not afraid of death and then not be killed, no matter how incredibly unlikely that might have seemed at the start of the scene.
Now, we head into the last double-bill of the season with the Savastano power struggle still unresolved. Can Genny really go to war against his father with the man who murdered his mother? (Luckily, Oedipus never went to Naples.) Will Ciro’s daughter find out he murdered her mother? And, at this point, is there anything that could happen – short of Conte returning from the dead on the right arm of Jesus – that would be a surprise?
And what do we think they will do for the third (and apparently already commissioned fourth) series? I’ve got a hankering they should introduce a writer who is exposing the Camorra in a book. Let’s see if they dare kill him off.
