yes agree with all of the above comments. Not much to add except the film clearly references several earlier Italian masterpieces. Rocco and His Brothers for one, Paisa for another. I love the way this film strips away the glamour which characterizes Hollywood gangster films to reveal the degraded, degenerate and putrid reality of the criminal world. The people most affected by crime are those at the bottom living on sink estates like the one depicted, with an ineffectual police content to contain the situation in the ghettos. There's a really telling scene where a young graduate, drawn in to a criminal conspiracy of illegal disposal of toxic waste, decides hes had enough. His boss tells him to dump a box of peaches grown on toxic land, 'can t you smell them' ... the way the fruit contrasts with the shiny, flashy big SUV this guy drives. Our knowledge as the audience of what hes been up to, signing off a container of toxic waste to the African captain of a container ship as 'humanitarian aid...' This sort of symbolism elevates the film to the level of the great Italian masterpieces of cinema. Peaches, fruit, food is such a staple of Italian culture. Perfect looking peaches which are grown on toxic land become a metaphor for Italy itself. The measured pace certainly wont be for everyone, five people walked out the multiplex where I watched it. This is the thinking persons gangster movie. You need to work at it. The violence is shocking for its matter of factness whats most disturbing is how human life and dignity have become utterly ... I dunno I m searching for words here. Trivial? Trivial isn't the right word. Its more complete and utter degradation. Human life here has lost all dignity. When someones killed its in almost documentary fashion. Conventions of the gangster genre are discarded instead its shocking in its suddenness and sheer banality. Two obese, sweaty men in bermuda shorts despatch a pair of coked up boys whove been making a nuisance of themselves. Human life here has no value and for me this masterpiece of cinema articulates my belief we are at the beginning of the end of Western civilisation. Appropriate coming from the country which gave us Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and Silvio Berlusconi...
