Suburra
Director: Stefano Sollima
Talent: Pierfrancesco Favino, Greta Scarano, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Giulia Gioretti
Release Date: 24th June
Rome, 2011: Ostia, the city’s most populated suburb, is set to be home to a new, Las Vegas-style strip, and everyone is getting a piece of the action, including the Catholic church. First though, a “Suburban Development Plan” needs to be forced through parliament by a government on the brink of collapse, and politician Filippo Malgradi (Favino) is the gangsters’ man of choice to do it. The trouble is a teenage prostitute has just died of an overdose at one of his hotel room sex benders, and he’s being blackmailed in exchange for silence about his involvement. Director Stefano Sollima, also of the ongoing Italian TV series Gomorrah, manages here the rare feat of depicting deeply interwoven institutional corruption — something that tends these days to be regarded as the preserve of serial drama — in a thoroughly convincing and dramatically satisfying manner. This is an excellent gangster movie of rare scope and scale, and its incongruous, festival-friendly soundtrack by M83 does little to dampen its effect.
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
