Criterion is regarded by most collectors as the gold standard for international masterpieces and classic cinema on DVD. This season, it stakes itself out as a player in contemporary international cinema with the release of two acclaimed foreign films: Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale (due December 1) and, this week, Matteo Garrone’s sprawling docu-realist drama Gomorrah (Criterion). The signature image of Garrone’s adaptation of Robert Saviano’s non-fiction book, an exposé of the dominance of organized crime in Naples and Caserta, is a pair of teenage boys running around a deserted beach in their underwear while shooting off automatic weapons. (The cover of the Criterion edition transforms the image into a surreal vision of a skinny teenage boy walking through the city like a Godzilla child-man.) That’s as much glamour as you can expect from the this portrait of the mob: emotionally immature boys playing at gangster, oblivious of the reality behind their Tony Montana fantasy.

Boys with guns will be boys

Set in the poverty of coastal regions of Naples and Caserta, Gomorrah is a long and at times grueling look at five stories of people caught up in the Neapolitan Camorra, the Mafia organization that rules the region. Their hands are in everything, from selling drugs and running guns to the rag trade and, yes, contracts to haul and dump garbage and toxic waste. The sprawl makes it hard to follow and harder to connect with the characters and their stories (I was far more engaged on a second viewing), but it makes its point about the reach of the Camorra and the culture it has spawned. Garrone, who came to features from documentary, he brings a clear-eyed approach to the film and captures an atmosphere of destruction and waste in a landscape of urban blight and poverty. Criterion is releasing the film on both two-disc DVD and single-disc Blu-ray (at the same price, as is their policy), each with the hour-long documentary “Five Stories,” video interviews with Garrone, actor Toni Servillo and author Roberto Saviano, deleted scenes and more.

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The Class (dir: Laurent Cantet)

Laurent Cantet’s The Class is one of five films up for an Academy Award on Sunday and one of the best films of 2008. Shot like a documentary, structured like a dramatic slice of socio-cultural reality and performed with an authenticity that cuts deep into the fiction, it’s a remarkably observant, effective and affecting portrait of a single group of junior high students over the course of a year in a single classroom. It’s a fictional film based on the memoir of teacher (Francois Bégaudeau, who essentially plays himself in the film) and it has a lot to say, but more importantly it has a lot to observe. Set in one of the poorer arrondissements (or suburbs) of Paris with a vibrant cultural mix (kids of African, Middle-Eastern, Carribean and Asian ancestry, some immigrants, many first-generation French), the environment can seem alien and chaotic as we’re thrown into it. But it’s steeped in specificity, thanks to young actors who bring the weight of very different lives to each of the willful characters. Cantet and Bégaudeau worked with 13 and 14-year-old local students, non-actors all, to create the characters and the improvisational environment for the film. It makes its major points but lets the “reality” of its young characters define itself outside of the constructed events, even through the film never leaves the confines of the school. The complex and at times volatile dynamics of the classroom takes on a life all its own.

The classroom

(T)his is not your classic tale of an inspiring teacher who wins the trust and respect of his triumphant class. The young cast, all nonactors who developed their characters with Cantet and Bégaudeau, brings the weight of full lives to each of the students.

Some of them take their street culture into the classroom and turn every interaction into a verbal confrontation, a matter of respect they demand without offering in return. The more articulate students make the case that French grammar and language skills have no relevance to their lives. They’re proud, frustrated, at times insolent and often playful. But they all have an integrity that burns with a conviction that can turn volatile.

I review the film for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer here.

Three Monkeys (dir: Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

Thanks to the vagaries of film distribution and the increasing difficulties of small films and foreign language productions to get theatrical releases, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Turkish drama, which won the Best Director award at Cannes 2008, this one-week Seattle engagement at the Varsity Theatre is the film’s American theatrical debut.

It’s a a beautifully observed film about a family unraveling when the father takes the rap (and a nine-month prison term) for a hit-and-run by his boss, a politician running for election. The son drifts into gangs and the mom approaches the politician for money to buy a car for son, so he can get a delivery job and get off the streets. A lot of films would drift into familiar territory – the car gets wrecked or stolen, the boss (who loses the election) refuses to pay, the boy pulls the family into crime, something that would all spiral into tragedy. And spiral it does, but through bad decisions and worse communication between family members who pull into themselves. The dramatic events that would be the focus of most filmmakers – beginning with the hit-and-run that throws off the orbit of the central family – take place off-screen. At times they are just out of the frame. Ceylan is more interested in the reactions and the repercussions, the human story beyond the headline events. There’s a fourth presence in this family as well, seen in visions of a little boy who haunts them all with his absence.

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