There are a dozen good reasons to see Matteo Garrone’s new film Gomorra, currently in competition at the Cannes film festival and just-released to Italian theatres last week. Bursting with the energy of City of God and aiming for the scope of 2002’s Traffic but within an Italian context, the film (based on Roberto Saviano’s best-selling book) is at turns frightening, thrilling, and depressing–a serious look at what appears a hopeless situation in the southern port city of Naples.

The sparkling energy on display is never too flashy or stylized–at times its documentary feel really does trick you into the feeling you’re watching something real, and with good reason–the book’s author, Roberto Saviano, had to seek police protection after the release of his book, in which he chronicled Naples’ Comorra (the Neapolitan version of the Cosa Nostra) as an insider. Filming in the authentic housing projects of Naples’ depressed periphery didn’t hurt, either.

Telling 5 interlocking stories in a Neapolitan dialect that can be difficult even for Italians (the version I saw was subtitled in ’standard’ Italian), Gomorra does a wonderful job of showing the messy situation at the bottom end of several Italian ‘industries’–fashion, garbage disposal, and drug-dealing, to name a few. Telling a series of interlocked stories is the only way to really explain anything about the Comorra, as the globalized, back-slapping nature of all the business dealings, above-ground and otherwise, is the film’s biggest point.

The fashion angle alone makes the film relevant: arguing that we are all somehow affected by the counterfeit fashion industry, no matter where or who we are, Gomorra reveals a whole host of ills. In the world of Italian fashion, as in Italian politics, finance, and to a large degree, Italian ’society’ itself, the line between what’s authentic and what’s not is often blurred beyond recognition. As Alexander Stille, one of the best English-language journalists writing on Italy, pointed out recently:

Despite the violation of their trademarks, the big fashion houses have been surprisingly slow to protest. Saviano suggests shrewdly that copying the brand may have actually served the interests of the big-name clothing makers. Saviano writes: “The garments they turned out were not inferior and didn’t disgrace the brands’ quality or design image. Not only did the clans not create any symbolic competition with the designer labels, they actually helped promote products whose market price made them prohibitive to the general public. In short, the clans were promoting the brand.” [...] to many, the indignities and corruption imposed by the illegal system are so widely accepted as to seem “natural.”

The film captures this divide (or lack of it) with pinpoint accuracy; although an English-subtitled version is likely some months away, Saviano’s book is widely available in translation. Anyone interested in understanding a little about the chaotic, perilous manufacturing that backs up some of the world’s top design would do well to pick it up, and to eagerly watch for the release of Garrone’s film.