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Suburra

This was part of the Revelation Perth International Film Festival and I caught it at the Luna Leederville last Saturday. It'd been quite a while since I'd been to that cinema but it hasn't changed a hell of a lot. Wide, fairly flat auditorium with a small screen and 'the best choc bombs in town' (with TM and thanks to Merv).

Suburra was apparently the name for a suburb of ancient Rome, a crowded, red-light district. An apt name for this film as it throws together dirty politicians, junkies, mafiosi and even the papacy in a massive shit-fight. It's basically a rainy, modern-day Westeros with Sofia Coppola DJ-ing.

The film places events around the time of the (fictional) Pope's resignation and one of many moments of turbulence in the Italian parliament (there's even a bunga-bunga episode that advances the plot). A waterfront land bill is moving ahead at the behest of 'the Southern families' and mafia money is greasing the political wheels. It gets a little frayed with perhaps a few too many character threads but I think it manages to tie everything together in a nice knot of offal.

A few familiar faces pop up. Pierfrancesco Favino is a sleazy polly (loosely based on Silvio Berlusconi, I'd guess), Jean-Hugues Anglade a dodgy Cardinal but all the cast are on solid form especially Adamo Dionisi as a gypsy kingpin and Greta Scarano as the headstrong, crack-head girlfriend of prime psycho, Numero 8.

There's nothing necessarily ground-breaking about Suburra but it's super stylised visually and has a powerful, if somewhat overbearing soundtrack by M83, a French electronic outfit. And the director, Stefano Sollima has a pretty good handle on the mood and pace of it all. Less gritty than Gomorra, and more disgustingly opulent, but just as confronting in its own glamorous way.

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