A long time before – relatively speaking – that Netflix landed on the boot starting to locally produce TV series and films, there was Sky to act as a forerunner with criminal novel. Made together with Cattleya, that series kicked off a vein of productions which, passing through the International Phenomenon of Gomorrah, would finally have led Italian TV to compete, albeit in limited areas in terms of genres of stories, with what normally came and comes from far more dynamic contexts (United States and England in the first place, but also France). That’s why we used that term, forerunner.

A respectable national primacy in what were the first steps of the affirmation of non -linear TV and everything he brought with him.

A primacy that, unfortunately, does not necessarily exclude the manifestation of proposals such as block 181 first and then the present Gangs of Milan – the new stories of the block.

Gangs of Milan: the plot

In the eight episodes that make up the series available exclusively on Sky and streaming on Now starting from March 21 (with two episodes out every Friday), we find some of the characters already known in block 181 Mahdi, who became the regent of the block after detecting the racket of the apartments from his uncle. And finally Ludovico who has to do with the inevitable ghosts of the past that lead him to get lost between excesses and drugs of all kinds to hide what, in reality, is a plan of revenge. The three find themselves united by a problem that unites them transversal.

But in the midst of an already tangled situation, we also put the new balances at the interns of the block. A peculiar habitat in which the multiethnic group of Kasba is emerging at whose guide there are two twenty -year -olds of Arabic origin Zak and Nael, determined to make their way both in the blockade as in life and, why not, on the trap music scene. Except that all these “good intentions” are inevitably full of petty crime and constant tension with most of the block residents.

A liberating sigh of relief

The title of this paragraph describes what we have experienced once the vision of Gangs of Milan is finished – the new block stories.

And we do not speak, unfortunately, of a sigh of relief that has to do with the resolution of a particular pitch hub or personal affair of this or that character. Because the vision of this production was, unfortunately, an exasperating experience and get to the epilogue a liberating experience.

There is no single aspect of gangs, for brevity we will refer to it in this way, which does not seem to be put there so as not to create any shock effect in the viewer. In a pounding way.

The direction is schizophrenic. In trying to give the three main storylines – Bea, Mahdi and Ludovico – a distinct visual and chromatic identity was obtained, to use a terminology dear to another great protagonist of the Sky schedule, the proverbial map. There is an aesthetic research as an end in itself that proposes direction of direction, assembly and photography solutions that seem to have taken weight from the most chopped of the films born between the nineties and the early 2000s. Those who perhaps tried to re -propose, on the big screen, of the typical expedients of years in which video clips still had “inside” space of that appliance called television whose use is thus drastically changed in the last ten years. Not that the thing itself should be read in a negative sense, we would miss more. There is no need to make lists of names and surnames, but in the world of entertainment there are many examples of video clip directors who have made the history of that expressive form and have managed to move more than well in other areas of the story by images.

With Gangs there is sometimes the feeling of having a faded and serialized copy of a video clip like Smack My Bitch Up of Prodigy (which was directed at the time by Jonas åkerlund) or a domino film of the late Tony Scott. Except that there, making the difference, there was the guy sitting behind the camera, Tony Scott in fact. The episodes are all long -lasting, from 48 to 65 minutes, and frequently the waters watering of the broth is frequently felt, between scenes brought too far for long and a bizarre fixation for some analogies communicated too literally based on alternating assembly of what happens in the naturalistic documentaries transmitted by TV and what happens, at the same time, to the characters of the series.

The general impression is a bit that, as already happened with block 181, of wanting to make a groove in the Milanese Banlieu sauce without all that mix of autory and great pop story that people like Sollima, Comencini, D’amore and Co have managed to instill to an epic whose greatest fault was a bit what always plays the most successful narratives on the world of crime: A little too unbalanced towards empathy addressed to so dramatic, but still morally reprovable figures. In Gangs it is all superficial, aestheticized and aestheticizing to the nth degree, with predictable narrative turns from the first minute.

And it is basically a shame. Because despite the paradox of a production that cites Milan in cubital characters in the title and was then turned larger in Turin because less probative on the cost side, the theme at the base of Gangs is however interesting also in the light of the many news events that come from the Lombard metropolis, from certain complicated areas and by the emergence of tensions with which, to say, some French cities have to do for years and years also as a direct consequence of the colonial past of the nation and In Italy, they are fresher, so to speak. Except that in the series they are faced with the superficiality of the most bitter of the trap texts and a glossy patina by Reel of Instagram.

And we are sorry to have to say that Gangs of Milan – The new stories of the block is really a great opportunity lost on this side.

VOTE: 5