Piranhas

This afternoon, I discovered this rather interesting film without having preliminary read the eponymous book written by Roberto Saviano and published in 2018: a band of eight teenage boys still eating chocolate cookies and arguing with the little brother when a packet of biscuits was emptied without their preliminary agreement, take opportunely advantage of the fall of the Mafioso of their Neapolitan district to become caliph instead of the caliph, like Iznogoud in the famous cartoon created by René Goscinny and Jean Tabary, but with ethics and values like Vito Corleone played by Robert De Niro in The Godfather Part II (1974). I recognized the mesmerizing atmosphere of Naples, with its manifold alleys as hilly as lively. Moreover, the cast is overall of high quality, especially the main actor Francesco Di Napoli.

The popularity of Italian language gang movies and TV shows has risen to high level in recent years and we have Gomorrah and Suburra to thank for that and while Piranhas isn't quite up to their standards, it's still an interesting look at the underclasses in Napoli .

Six 15-year-old boys deal drugs and use assault rifles to rule their neighborhood in Naples, interested only in making money, wearing designer clothes and surviving in a world where they believe they have no future.

There isn't much of a story in this film . It flows like the boys lives . Without a care . The kids live for today and that's the way the movie is made . Not a great deal of structure but plenty of spontaneity. They probably know things are never going to turn out well but they are going to enjoy it while they can .

Exactly as it did watching it .

Unfortunately the stories depicted on this movie are true or based on facts that really and daily happen in Naples.

It's another world if you compare with the rest of Italy. It's the devil place.

The movie is well done and the actors are good. But it's pity to see these things.

Watch it and then judge with your eyes.

I have a lot of friends from Naples and they said this movie depicts the reality of the situation of the youth in Naples today. You follow the story of one boy with his friends who tries to make ends meet while they dont go to school and easily succumb to the ways of the Mafia for easy money. It's really sad. The movie is well made and well paced, you keep asking yourself what are they going do to next and how is this going to end. The love story dragged on a little bit but otherwise its a good watch that I would recommend.

I don't think that books are automatically better than their movie adaptations, but this is clearly the case: not only a lot of changes were made but the general meaning of the story was subverted, delivering a faded, less thought-provoking message.

Saviano penned both the screenplay and the novel, but he and the other writers choose to omit the violent scenes, include several scenes that did not occur in the novel, and change the personality of the main character.

In the movie, Nicholas is a teenager who essentially dreams about making mafia "great again", and is portrayed as having a sense of justice and being essentially a good boy who did terrible decisions. The violence is limited to a few gunshots, and the meaning of the ending focuses on the impossibility of change.

In the novel, Nicolas is immediately portrayed as a power-thirsty teenager who was inspired by Machiavelli and that has no ethics whatsoever (e.g., mild spoilers, to give an idea: to punish a gang member for having stolen a gun without permission, he almost forces his sister to be gang raped; the movie version of the character would have never done this). The violence is brutal and striking, and the story aims at describing the inner evil that teenagers that are involved with the System experience because of the environment they live in.

I personally felt much more invested while reading the novel than while watching the movie. Except for one specific scene that was the only identical one to the novel, most of the sequences felt dry or non-authentic. For who knows the novel, I think it is impossible to appreciate the film. Technically wise, it felt very similar to Garrone's Gomorra, probably it aimed at replicating the feel of that movie, but while the distanced photography and dryness of sequences in Gomorra gave a "tranche de vie" feel, it is not the case for La Paranza dei Bambini. It is sad that this film was chosen to be ran at Berlinale, when Italy has just released Il Primo Re, a masterful and very creative work of art that risks not receiving well-deserved international recognition.