COUNTERPUNCH, AUGUST 2, 2019
Opening today at the Howard Gilman Theater in Lincoln Center, “Piranhas” is a coming-of-age film about 15-year-old wannabe gangsters living on the mean streets of Naples. It is based on a fact-based novel by Robert Saviano titled “La Paranza dei Bambini” that means “The Children’s Gang”, a much better title for a very good film.
Saviano also wrote another fact-based novel titled “Gomorrah”, which the 2008 film of the same name was based on. If Alexander Stile’s “Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic” is the key text for understanding the Sicilian mafia, Saviano’s novels play the same role for the Camorra, the Naples-based mafia that is arguably more embedded in the Italian corporate state than its rivals and more destructive. Unlike the Sicilians, the Neapolitans do not have a hierarchical structure in which a top don controls the clans beneath him. More horizontal than vertical, the gangs in the Campania region of southern Italy are notorious for the bloody feuds that drive the narratives of films based on Saviano’s novels. This review will take up the two aforementioned films as well as “Gomorrah”, the two-season Italian TV series on Netflix that is based on Saviano’s novel with alternating directors, including Claudio Giovannesi who directed “Pirhanas”.
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