There is a video that has become very viral, on social media, in the last few days. It is that of Mimmo Borrelli, aka ‘O Maestrale, who to transform himself into the character he plays in the fifth (and last) season of Gomorrah, takes out a comb to ruffle his beard. He tugs at her, combing her in the opposite direction. A comb to change face, expression, intentions.
With the season finale (and of the series) of Gomorrah, it feels a bit like the beard of ‘O Maestrale: combed in reverse, shattered by an emotional earthquake that you don’t know where it takes you. And it lifts you up a little, it torments you a little.
Empathy for Evil
Gomorrah – The Series it ends up in the only way possible, but not for this without outbursts of pathos that it takes you time to metabolize. And the image of Ciro Di Marzio and Gennaro Savastano, killed on a beach, sticks to your head as if it were real. And maybe it really is. Because death is the final judgment, the truce of a television series that is not just a series. It is the story and the pain of abandoned territories. It is anguish and dreams of places where situationism, rather than destiny, decides. There has been much discussion in recent years about how much Gomorrah can affect people’s feelings. And how you exude, in some ways, a kind of unjust empathy towards characters who are nothing but Camorra.
Were Ciro and Gennaro really us?
Take Ciro Di Marzio: he killed his wife, suffocating her. He brutally murdered a girl guilty of loving a street urchin. He’s committed an infinity of murders and crimes that would only deserve hell. Yet when a bullet, in the dark, knocks him out in front of the sea of Naples and the lifeless body of Gennaro, you almost feel the pain. And it almost drags you with it, into that hell I was talking about. How do you feel Gennaro’s pain, moments before, when his son Pietrino is one step away from a bullet in the forehead because of him. And falls into a vortex of despair that almost drags you. You’re on the sofa at home, but you feel like you’re on that beach too. It is not a fault to feel viscerally involved. It is the magic of cinema. Nothing else. Or nothing better.
Who killed the Immortal
Ciro Di Marzio is nobody’s son, who escaped an earthquake that buried everyone except him, who becomes the Immortal. Gennaro Savastano is the son of a king (Don Pietro, boss of Secondigliano), and was born to “command, kill and make money”. Marco D’Amore and Salvatore Esposito, in this fifth and final season, have grown considerably. They took that extra step that they were missing and that was terribly necessary to end this series. Gomorrah closes and seems to save you from the darkness in which it made you fall. Because the death of Ciro and Gennaro – and of all the characters involved in this story – is saving. It is the epilogue of a life that cannot leave you alive. It is the Camorra that is dying. It is clarity, although it leaves you dismayed. And the last bullet, the one that pierces the darkness and ends up in the temples of Cyrus the Immortal, seems to have come from nowhere. It is as if no one had exploded it. Or maybe we all pulled that trigger.
