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| Images courtesy of Unearthed Films |
Unearthed Films is usually known for transgressive boundary
pushing shockers aimed at edgier filmgoers eager for something that doesn’t
play nice in the sandbox, but every now and again they acquire critically renowned
films that don’t play by their usual rule of thumb. Such is the case of Stefano Sollima’s 2015 Netflix
produced Italian crime saga Suburra which got turned into a Netflix television
series of the same name two years later, possibly the best Italian mafia epic
since Matteo Garrone’s nonfiction crime tale Gomorrah.
The son of Italian filmmaker/screenwriter Sergio Sollima of Face
to Face spaghetti western fame, Sollima himself participated in the loosely
inspired television series iteration of Gomorrah before directing the Italian
riot control force police drama ACAB – All Cops Are Bastards in
2012. Little did audiences know that
three years later Sollima would unveil Suburra, a film that singlehandedly
landed him a stint in Hollywood twice with Sicario: Day of the Soldado and
the Amazon Prime produced Michael B. Jordan actioner Without Remorse.
November 2011, Ostia becomes the focus of a major real estate
project designed to transform the harbor of Ancient Rome into a modern-day sort
of Las Vegas hotspot. The endeavor is
rife with political corruption with many ties to the Italian Mafia Capitale who
have a strong interest in the completion of the project. Further still the project has ties to the
Vatican Bank who are the key financiers with local crime boss “Samurai”
(Claudio Amendola) keen on ensuring nothing interferes with the project.
But when key Italian MP Filippo Malgradi (Pierfrancesco
Favino) gets into an illicit sexual tryst with an underage prostitute who dies
from a crack cocaine overdose, it triggers a domino rally of bodies falling for
revenge that not only threatens the project but many of the existing powers within
Italian politics itself. By the end of a
seven-day war between criminal factions, many of the film’s main characters
will end up dying in horrifically brutal ways while those left surviving are
determined to eat each other alive.
Named after a suburb of Ancient Rome, the ensemble crime
saga based on the 2013 novel of the same name by Carlo Bonini and Giancarlo De
Cataldo and adapted for the screen by Stefano Rulli and Sandro Petraglia, Suburra
is a superb Italian crime epic of the highest order. Though briefly sexually graphic in one scene,
the film quickly becomes a riveting saga of bullets flying and once-powerful
figures seeing their worlds drop out from under them.
Brilliantly photographed by Paolo Carnera who
does some things with the camera and wide-angled shots I’ve honestly never seen
in a film before and aided by a piercing electronic score by M83, this is Italy’s
answer to Michael Mann’s Heat in terms of the scale, the audiovisual
beauty and the way all the chess pieces gradually fall into their respective
places. Powerfully acted with much of
the heavy lifting on the shoulders of beleaguered politician Filippo Malgradi
and Elio Germano as a villa owner caught in the middle trying to preserve what
little power he has left.
Brutal, unforgiving, inevitable, Suburra is a stone
cold masterpiece of Italian neo-noir crime saga storytelling that points to (at
the time) political inseparability from crime and how much of the social
monuments and high watermarks of the country around 2011 were bound in
blood. Outside of being a realistic crime
drama, as an ensemble piece the film is riveting for all of its over two-hour
running time and Unearthed Films have given the picture a spectacular release
replete with a two-hour making-of documentary included. More than having earned the torch passed down
by his father Sergio, Stefano Sollima’s towering mob politics epic is one of
the very best releases Unearthed Films has ever unleashed on their dedicated
fanbase.
--Andrew Kotwicki
