The Embalmer (2002)
Directed by Matteo Garrone
Peppino, a diminutive taxidermist with a reputation for sleaziness, meets Valerio, a handsome if artless much younger man fascinated by the trade. Peppino offers him a large salary to be his assistant—the job burgeoning into a budding friendship he mistakes for something more. When Valerio gets a girlfriend, their fledgling romance will be threatened by an insanely jealous third wheel.
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What critics compared The Embalmer to
Director/co-writer Matteo Garrone, who also directed The Embalmer, goes for an appropriate cinma vrit that makes you, the viewer, feel merely like a spectator a voyeur into the intersecting lives of all these characters who go about their daily routines in Naples.
Roberto Saviano’s tell-all mafia expose provides rich narrative soil for director Matteo Garrone ("The Embalmer" - 2002) to weave together five stories of mob-related corruption sucking dry the Italian industrial province of Naples and its squalid suburbs and infecting the entire financial landscape of the European economy.
It's the 39-year-old Italian director Matteo Garroneâs ("First Love"/"Guests"/"The Embalmer") Cannes Grand Prix-winner, as he artfully weaves together five fictionalized similar themed stories to relate the mob activities to capitalism and in a fast-moving chilling documentary style grimly and violently pulls off a first-rate detailed exposé on the mafia operation of instilling fear into the community to root out opposition.
But the balance of the movie--scripted by director Matteo Garrone (The Embalmer), journalist Roberto Saviano, and four others--takes a less sensational, more investigative approach to its subject, interweaving four diverse story lines to show how the Neapolitan crime organization known as the Camorra has reached its tentacles into construction, garbage removal, the garment industry, and the ghetto drug trade.
Director Matteo Garrone ( The Embalmer ) finds a casual, stone-faced, almost neo-realist pace for all this, casually flipping back and forth between storylines, and making brilliant use of seemingly endless array of run-down and abandoned buildings and spaces (with all their jagged shadows).