Unfinished Business: Screening the Mafia in the New Millennium by Dana Renga (review)

Dana Renga’s 2011 edited volume Mafia Movies: A Reader (University of Toronto Press) brought together a range of scholars to discuss the representation of the Mafia in both the US and Italian cinema. As well as chapters on canonical American films such as The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) and Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990), Mafia Movies included pieces on more recent, lesser-known Italian films such as Pasquale Scimeca’s Placido Rizzotto (2000) and Roberta Torre’s Angela (2002). These latter chapters testified to Italian directors’ continued fascination with the Mafia, and Renga explores the subject further in her sole-authored book Unfinished Business: Screening the Mafia in the New Millennium, which looks at ten key Italian Mafia pictures made after 2000.

In her introduction, the author states that the book “looks at recent Italian Mafia cinema through the lens of gender and trauma theory” and that her interest is “in how representations of gender in these films dialogue with the unfinished or delayed process of grieving, mourning, and healing of Mafia-related trauma.” In particular, Renga turns the spotlight on the role of women, who, she argues, “have not necessarily come to occupy centre stage, but … have been cast in much more interesting, ambivalent, and complex roles.” Renga points out that “a close examination of the apparent liminal presence of women and non-conforming identities in these films exposes the limitations of what counts as human in a Mafia context both onscreen and in the nation at large.” Of the films Renga chooses to discuss, only a small number will be familiar to a non-specialist audience outside of Italy (Marco Tullio Giordana’s The Hundred Steps, Paolo Sorrentino’s The Consequences of Love, Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah), but the author’s stimulating analysis will no doubt inspire readers of Unfinished Business to track down as many of the remaining titles as possible. Even for the films that have had the most exposure internationally, Renga provides alternative and highly original readings. For her discussion of The Consequences of Love, Oscar-winning Sorrentino’s breakthrough film, for instance, she chooses to focus on Sofia (Olivia Magnani), who, by sparking off the transgression of lead character Titta Di Girolamo (Toni Servillo), “threatens the traditional logic of desire prevalent in Italian Mafia movies from the new millennium.” In her chapter on Gomorrah, Renga highlights “the Liminal Status of Mafia women” by discussing the character of Maria (played by Italian singer/actress Maria Nazionale). Despite having relatively little screen time, Maria occupies an important position in Garrone’s film and “perfectly encapsulates the condition of a donna di mafia [Mafia woman].”

In many ways it’s a shame that the acclaimed television spinoff of Gomorrah (2014) aired only after the publication of Unfinished Business, as the author would no doubt have had much to say about the series’s many different female characters, including one of the strongest in recent screen depictions of the Mafia, Maria Pia Calzone’s Imma Savastano. That being said, there’s no doubt that Renga’s volume is essential reading for scholars of both Mafia films and Italian cinema more widely.