Short Story: “Critical Lenses on the Film ‘Goncharov’”

Note: This story is a contribution to a fictive body of critical and fan discussion being built around a nonexistent Mafia movie called Goncharov. One can learn the basics of how this discussion came about by searching for the alleged movie’s title. In the Goncharovian spirit of collective authorship and modern myth-making, I’m electing to put this story under a Creative Commons “Attribution” license, the most permissive kind. Anybody can do anything with the material in this story as long as some vague gesture is made towards crediting me with some of the ideas. Many of my own ideas, after all, emerged from the broader atmosphere of improv-like storytelling and mythbuilding that swept the internet in general and the microblogging website Tumblr in particular late last month.

With the recent upsurge of interest in the 1973 Mafia film Goncharov, it behooves the critic to give a brief survey of this film’s previous reception. Critical analysis has focused on several main areas and themes within the film: its sexual elements (in particular the homoerotic undertones between Goncharov and Andrey and between Katya and Sofia) and connected feminist concerns, its religious motifs, its atypicality for an early Martin Scorsese film, and its potential political subtexts, to name just a few. This brief essay will attempt to overview, in an unsystematic way, some of those lenses. Appended are synopses (with much unavoidable repetition) of all cuts and releases of the original film from 1973 through 2003; it remains to be seen whether next year’s fiftieth anniversary release will depart significantly from any of these. Since the focus of this essay is the original film in all its versions, we will not be addressing Quentin Tarantino’s abortive late-1990s remake, or the 1981 Turkish ripoff Moskova’dan dev adam (Mighty Men from Moscow) starring Yavuz Selekman and Cüneyt Arkın. The best treatment of Moskova’dan dev adam in English is a chapter in Yuli Lowe’s 2005 book Remix and Pastiche in Turkish Action Cinema: A Moviegoer’s Guide. Tarantino’s ideas for the attempted 1990s remake, some of which made it in highly variant form into 2009’s Inglourious Basterds, are described in almost all detailed surveys of his oeuvre. Of note regarding the Tarantino concept is that it is generally considered to have a tighter plot than does the cryptic, occasionally slapdash original film.

The sexual dimension of Goncharov has been the subject of much recent attention and as such is perhaps the best place to begin. In particular the relationship between Katya and Sofia has seen many different perspectives over the years. In a manner similar to J.R.R. Tolkien’s obsessive reworkings of Galadriel’s backstory to smooth down her hard edges, the first few rereleases and re-edits of Goncharov consistently softened Katya and Sofia’s characters and relationship with each other, mostly as a response to persistent lesbian and feminist critiques of the film throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. This process culminated in the 1993 twentieth-anniversary version of the film, in which Scorsese became an unwitting cinematic pioneer by giving Katya and Sofia a relatively happy and all but expressly lesbian ending. However, feminist critics of the original film later reassessed the rerelease and began to argue that the softer ending had the unintended effect of pedestalizing women and relationships between women. The thirtieth-anniversary rerelease in 2003 was substantially similar to the original cinematic release regarding Katya and Sofia, but followed the 1987 director’s cut in expanding on Icepick Joe’s backstory and role in Goncharov’s second act.

Katya and Sofia are, however, secondary characters, although Katya is one of the three leads and both women are important in all versions of the film’s denouement. What of Goncharov and Andrey? Although the two Soviet gangsters out of their time and place get top billing and the film’s climactic showdown, it takes the bulk of Goncharov’s length for the true importance of their relationship to become apparent. Since Andrey, diegetically, knows Goncharov very well, the core premise of Goncharov’s fundamental unknowability to the viewer necessitates that they spend relatively little time interacting, and when they do interact, they discuss mostly philosophical and abstract subjects. Gene Hackman’s character of Valery, a personal aide to both Goncharov and Andrey who has little independent agency and thus does not appear in most plot synopses but has more screentime and higher billing than many of the film’s better-remembered characters, is the viewer’s main source for the preexisting personal relationship between Goncharov and his betrayer. According to Valery’s interactions with Andrey and with Goncharov, the two men considered each other best friends for most of their lives, had a brief falling-out two or three years prior to arriving in Naples and reconciled several months later, and both helped Valery himself survive his hard teenage years in postwar Moscow. De Niro and Keitel’s unusually homoerotic acting choices combine with this background to create a popular perception of Goncharov and Andrey as former lovers (and perhaps even Valery’s co-parents, although Hackman was visibly older than De Niro and Keitel at the time the film was made).

Goncharov was long thought of primarily as a “dry run” for Scorsese’s career and other films. It was Scorcese’s third film, after the relatively obscure Who’s That Knocking at My Door and Boxcar Bertha, and his second turn as a producer (Boxcar Bertha was produced by Roger Corman). Although Scorsese directed the English-speaking actors and was the name most prominently associated with the film in the United States, the driving force behind much of the screenplay and directing style was the Italian polymath Matteo JWHJ0715, a pseudonym for Matteo Negri. Negri deliberately imitated the dreamlike style of The Godfather, and Goncharov thus “feels” very different from Scorsese’s later gangster epics Goodfellas, Casino, Gangs of New York, The Departed, and The Irishman. In 2016, however, the release of Scorsese’s Silence led to a reappraisal of his religious thinking as represented in Goncharov’s religious motifs, many of which, such as Father Gianni’s theme- and tone-setting sermon and the sole-survivor message bottle at the end, seem derived from Moby-Dick.

Attempts to retroactively insert Goncharov into Scorsese’s so-called “trilogy of faith” aside, however, religion is clearly a secondary concern in the film, and critics who look at it primarily through the religious lens still tend to think of it mostly in relationship with other Scorsese films. Goncharov, The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun, and Silence do not a coherent tetralogy make except by “reading” the films backwards starting from Silence, at least some of whose themes are present in each of the other three (Last Temptation’s moral tension and divine absence, Kundun’s emphasis on persecution and exile, and Goncharov’s depiction of “individual” attempts to cope with the failure of religious community). The other way in which critics have applied the religious lens to Goncharov is as a supplementary or auxiliary lens in analyses primarily focused on other aspects of the film, such as its political and sexual components. One recently popular combination of the religious and sexual lenses involves Katya’s reaction to Father Gianni’s sermon. Scorsese, directing the Anglophone Cybill Shepherd, has Katya obviously fumble with core aspects of Catholic worship such as the sign of the cross and standing for the Gospel reading; since Katya does not perform the Eastern Orthodox equivalents of these actions either, recent critics have interpreted her as staunchly irreligious and/or Jewish, and her discomfort with the sermon as not necessarily limited to its anti-mafia content.

Despite the film’s ambiguities concerning Russian (and broader Soviet) culture, Katya’s attitude towards religion not least of those ambiguities, perceptions of Goncharov as tacitly pro-Russian make it currently unpopular in much of Central and Eastern Europe. Protests in connection with upcoming fiftieth-anniversary screenings have already racked up thousands of planned attendees in cities like Kyiv, Lviv, Warsaw, and Vilnius; in Lviv in particular local politicians have attempted to get the screenings shut down or moved to smaller venues under wartime emergency provisions. Scorsese has condemned attempts to read a right-wing political salience into the film, the political right currently seeming, or being, pro-Russian in much of the developed world; the idea that Goncharov is some sort of advocacy for Russian culture per se is the only critical lens that its makers have actively and loudly repudiated, but in the current world environment surrounding Russia’s war on Ukraine it is morally and emotionally difficult to directly defend the movie around Ukrainian, Polish, or Baltic-states critics.

This concludes our all-too-brief overview of a few select critical lenses on Goncharov. Synopses of all readily available versions of the film are appended below, with, as warned, much unavoidable repetition.

Christina Martinelli-Rubinsky

Assistant Professor of Film & Media Studies

Art Department, Smith College

❦

ORIGINAL CINEMATIC RELEASE

ACT ONE

Naples, 1973. A mysterious stranger with a suitcase full of ammunition and counterfeit money arrives from the Soviet Union. He is met at the airport by ANDREY, a man claiming to be his cousin.

Andrey makes introductions for his so-called cousin GONCHAROV with a group of Camorra figures led by MARIO AMBROSINI. Mario invites Goncharov to a gambling den to discuss unspecified “resources” that Goncharov has brought with him from Moscow. Andrey escorts Goncharov to his apartment, where they rendezvous with Goncharov’s wife, KATYA.

That evening, Goncharov and Katya go to the gambling den for the meeting with Mario. While Goncharov and Mario are talking, Katya wanders off and begins flirting with SOFIA, a local woman with a haunted, hardbitten look. Katya and Sofia start drinking, then go out onto a balcony where Katya, drunk, tries to impress Sofia by telling her that she and her husband have been sent to Naples to advance some Soviet political agenda, ambiguously either pro- or anti-regime, pro- or anti-communist. In return, Sofia, who is impressed, tells Katya a secret of her own: she is embezzling money from one of Mario’s front companies, in hopes of leaving Naples and setting up flower shop somewhere else on the Mediterranean.

We cut to MARIO’S DRIVER, who is eavesdropping on them. Noticing his presence, Katya intends to warn her husband. However, Sofia, desperate to stop the information discussed from getting back to either Goncharov or Mario, goads Katya to throw the driver off the balcony to his death instead–the first of many murders in the film. Sofia screams for help; Katya, meanwhile, looks fascinated, drawn in.

Goncharov and Katya leave the casino separately. When Katya arrives back at their apartment, very late and very obviously drunk, Goncharov suspects her of infidelity–but with Andrey, not Sofia. That night, Goncharov dreams of his late great-grandfather.

The next day, Goncharov confides his suspicions about Katya in a near-stranger, the cat-loving Italian-American hit man ICEPICK JOE. Icepick Joe reassures Goncharov and takes him to meet Andrey’s half-sister (through a father who was embedded in an Italian partisan group as a Soviet spy/advisor during the War), CATERINA. Caterina warns Goncharov that he can never entirely trust Mario, who is erratic, paranoid, and xenophobic, and by extension not to trust Icepick Joe, who is on Mario’s payroll.

Katya and Sofia have a chance encounter at a fruit stand in a scene redolent of the forbidden fruit in the Book of Genesis. They return to the gambling den, where they behave in a sexually suggestive way with each other in front of Goncharov, precipitating an argument between Goncharov and Andrey that soon escalates into a fistfight. Andrey knocks Goncharov unconscious and Goncharov has another dream of his great-grandfather.

Several days later, Andrey and Goncharov have reconciled without explanation. They debate whether or not they can trust Mario, and implicitly also Caterina (who has advised them not to trust Mario). Katya plays piano in the next room, building to a gradual crescendo that joins with the sound of a ticking grandfather clock to drown out the two men’s voices.

Katya stalks Mario to Mass at the Church of Gesù Nuovo, hoping to talk to him afterwards about his plans for his professional relationship with her husband. At the church she is unsettled by a vituperative anti-mafia sermon by the “angry young man” priest FATHER GIANNI. This is intercut with a scene of Goncharov and Andrey at the same fruit stand where Katya and Sofia encountered each other earlier. They have a long discussion about fruit that takes on metaphorical significance about their feelings of displacement in their new country. They then proceed to commit several assassinations for Mario’s Camorra family in quick succession, which continues to be intercut with Father Gianni’s sermon in much the same manner as the assassination/baptism sequence that ends The Godfather. Mario pays close attention to the sermon and is not as visibly unsettled by it as is Katya.

ACT TWO

Andrey and Caterina visit the recently-closed Fontanelle Cemetery, which they believe is their father’s final resting place. They discuss the sense of homelessness and unbelonging that they attribute to their father (flashbacks will later indicate that this may be projection), and Caterina asks Andrey if he thinks Goncharov feels the same way.

Goncharov, meanwhile, tries to locate Mario to discuss the wave of killings with which the previous act concluded. Mario agrees to meet him at a high-end hotel restaurant, but when Goncharov arrives with Katya accompanying him, they are greeted not by Mario himself but by his mother, MARIELLA. Mariella orders enormous quantities of alcohol and very little food, Goncharov attempts to drink her under the table, and Mariella confides in Goncharov and Katya that she feels that in agreeing to meet with them on her son’s behalf she agreed to walk to her death. Goncharov, disturbed at the implication that Mariella thinks he intended to kill Mario, catches something out of the corner of his eye. He orders one last bottle of liquor “for the table” and, when it arrives, pulls out a handgun and shoots it. As Katya and Mariella take cover from the splashing alcohol and flying glass, Goncharov barges back into the kitchen, where he sees Mario escaping out a back doorway into an alley.

Mario leads Goncharov on a long chase through the cramped streets of Naples, but when Goncharov finally tracks him down, Mario acts chummy and darkly humorous, cracking grim jokes and congratulating Goncharov on “finding him out.” Finally Mario tells Goncharov that he has decided that nobody from the Soviet Union has any place in the Camorra and that they can only be subordinates, never partners. Goncharov leaves without replying to him, but Icepick Joe fires at him with a sniper rifle and wings him, badly damaging Goncharov’s dominant arm.

The movie then follows Icepick Joe as he goes home to his flat, attempts to write a scene in a play fictionalizing (and whitewashing) the historical origins of the Camorra, and feeds the neighborhood street cat Dolce. He goes to confession at a priest’s home (the confessor has the voice of Father Gianni, but is never shown clearly onscreen), is absolved, and wanders Naples at night and into the early morning before falling asleep on the doorstep of a derelict nightclub.

The wounded Goncharov must attend an inconveniently timed meeting with his mysterious backers, who are visiting from the Soviet Union on their way to Latin America. He sends Katya in his place and, in a moment of comic relief that quickly turns dead-serious, she enlists Sofia’s help as a male impersonator to make it look as if Goncharov is present in the conversation but not participating. Unbeknownst to Katya, Sofia has also taken money from Mario and Mariella to provide, or corroborate, false information regarding the efficacy of Goncharov and Andrey’s work for them, in the hope that this will induce the Soviets to withdraw their operations from Naples. Sofia intends to use this money to buy a cruise ship ticket out of Naples so that she can start a new life, much as Goncharov himself is trying to start a new life by relocating from the Soviet Union to Italy.

The two women share a furtive kiss in a dressing room before proceeding to a louche restaurant in which two old, well-dressed Central Asian men grill Katya about the whereabouts of various people whom her husband was meant to have killed. Many of these men were in fact killed in the Act One climax, but Katya does not know this. Sofia, dressed as Goncharov but not particularly plausibly, implies that many of the people Goncharov killed have in fact survived. The two men, infuriated, storm out.

One of the two men, “BRIGHTON BEACH BORIS,” accosts Goncharov at home and demands to know who the “man” with Katya was. Goncharov rises from the bathtub in which he is convalescing and shoots Brighton Beach Boris in a rage. He storms out half-dressed without waiting to see if he has killed Boris. With day breaking, Goncharov wanders Naples screaming Andrey’s name, until he finds and is found by the still-drowsy Icepick Joe. Goncharov returns home with Icepick Joe and falls asleep in his bed, at which point he dreams of his great-grandfather for the third time.

Icepick Joe leaves his flat to feed Dolce; Andrey goes to Goncharov’s flat to tell Katya and Sofia that Goncharov is alive and where they might find him. We see the other Soviet visitor, “IL COMMENDATORE,” whispering orders into Andrey’s ear inGoncharov’s flat after Katya and Sofia leave, intercut with Joe, Katya, and Sofia walking the streets comparing notes on Goncharov’s whereabouts and wellbeing. When Joe, Katya, and Sofia cut through an abandoned construction site on their way back to Joe’s flat, Andrey reappears and opens fire, revealing that he has been instructed to double-cross Goncharov. Katya almost dies in the resulting firefight, but Sofia pulls her to safety and the two women leave Icepick Joe to his fate.

ACT THREE

Andrey, after killing Icepick Joe, has breakfast with Caterina at a restaurant with a panoramic view of the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius. He tells her that he and Goncharov arrived in Naples without any understanding of Mario Ambrosini’s position in the city’s underworld or of his personality. Caterina apologizes and asks if Andrey is sure that Boris and il Commendatore trust him to “clean up the mess”--revealing that Mario’s decision to freeze out the Soviets has made it back to the latter. Andrey assures her that he has their trust, because Goncharov antagonized them by sending Katya to meet with them in his stead and because Caterina gives Andrey a permanent personal relationship in Naples, whereas Goncharov “has no home in this world.”

The movie then begins to escalate to a final showdown between Goncharov and Andrey. Katya and a still badly hurt Goncharov escape from Icepick Joe’s flat and attempt to flee Naples by stealing a boat. During the attempted crossing to Ischia the boat is fired upon; Katya realizes that the prevailing wind is being used to obscure the direction of the gunshots and begins navigating a safe course back towards the mainland. She grounds the boat down the coast from the city and she and Goncharov begin a hard, dreamlike trek overland, finally arriving in the ruins of Pompeii.

Brighton Beach Boris, still alive, has been tracking Goncharov and Katya. Katya notices him and alerts Goncharov, as she initially meant to do with Mario’s driver in Act One. Boris manages to place a phone call to il Commendatore and Andrey before Goncharov shoots him again, this time fatally.

Katya notices that Goncharov’s arm wound has gone septic, endangering the whole limb. She asks him about seeking out a back-alley amputation, a question that escalates into a violent argument when he tells her that he would rather die than lose the ability to shoot. Katya, either afraid of Goncharov or wishing to give him the death he has asked for, fires on her husband, but misses, leading to the famous exchange “I shot you because I love you.”/”If you really loved me, you wouldn’t have missed.”

Andrey and Caterina lead a series of violent reprisals against Mario’s faction, including killing Mariella with a car bomb and Mario himself with a socket wrench. Andrey then sets off for Pompeii for the showdown with Goncharov.

When Andrey arrives, Goncharov asks him to leave Naples together and attempt to leave the criminal underworld. He appeals to their shared childhood in wartime Moscow and seems on the verge of confessing to Andrey that he loves him when Andrey finally opens fire. After a short, brutal fight (guns, then knives, then fists) that Goncharov loses badly, Andrey embraces Goncharov, then shoots him through the head from ear to ear.

Seeing Katya, Andrey attempts to apologize, but Katya simply leaves without a word, as Goncharov did during his earlier confrontation with Mario. Andrey realizes that in killing Goncharov he has killed a part of his own self, the part that always wavers and reinvents and tries to find somewhere to belong. He embraces Goncharov’s dead body in a shot mimicking Ilya Repin’s “Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son.” Then he drives back to Naples in silence to rendezvous with il Commendatore and discuss the problems of succession in the leadership of the Camorra.

Il Commendatore sends an assassin after Katya, but Sofia, who is visiting Katya to console her about Goncharov’s death, takes the bullet for her. With her last breath, Sofia offers Katya the cruise ship ticket that she bought with the money Mario and Mariella gave her for precipitating Goncharov’s fall. Katya accepts the ticket, feigns willingness to become il Commendatore’s mistress, and poisons him.

Katya spends most of her time on the cruise ship trying and failing to write the first draft of a novel. Finally, she stuffs the fragmentary draft into a wine bottle and casts it out onto the waters of Mare Nostrum, where it slowly fades to the iconic final shot of a running sandglass.

THE END

❦

1987 DIRECTOR’S CUT

ACT ONE

Naples, 1973. A mysterious stranger with a suitcase full of ammunition and counterfeit money arrives from the Soviet Union. He is met at the airport by ANDREY, a man claiming to be his cousin.

Andrey makes introductions for his so-called cousin GONCHAROV with a group of Camorra figures led by MARIO AMBROSINI. Mario invites Goncharov to a gambling den to discuss unspecified “resources” that Goncharov has brought with him from Moscow. Andrey escorts Goncharov to his apartment, where they rendezvous with Goncharov’s wife, KATYA.

That evening, Goncharov and Katya go to the gambling den for the meeting with Mario. While Goncharov and Mario are talking, Katya wanders off and begins flirting with SOFIA, a local woman with a haunted, hardbitten look. Katya and Sofia start drinking, then go out onto a balcony where Katya, drunk, tries to impress Sofia by telling her that she and her husband have been sent to Naples to advance some Soviet political agenda, ambiguously either pro- or anti-regime, pro- or anti-communist. In return, Sofia, who is impressed, tells Katya a secret of her own: she is embezzling money from one of Mario’s front companies, in hopes of leaving Naples and setting up flower shop somewhere else on the Mediterranean.

We cut to MARIO’S DRIVER, who is eavesdropping on them. Noticing his presence, Katya intends to warn her husband. However, Sofia, desperate to stop the information discussed from getting back to either Goncharov or Mario, goads Katya to throw the driver off the balcony to his death instead–the first of many murders in the film. Sofia screams for help; Katya, meanwhile, looks fascinated, drawn in.

Goncharov and Katya leave the casino separately. When Katya arrives back at their apartment, very late and very obviously drunk, Goncharov suspects her of infidelity–but with Andrey, not Sofia. That night, Goncharov dreams of his late great-grandfather.

The next day, Goncharov confides his suspicions about Katya in a near-stranger, the cat-loving Italian-American hit man ICEPICK JOE. Icepick Joe reassures Goncharov and takes him to meet Andrey’s half-sister (through a father who was embedded in an Italian partisan group as a Soviet spy/advisor during the War), CATERINA. Caterina warns Goncharov that he can never entirely trust Mario, who is erratic, paranoid, and xenophobic, and by extension not to trust Icepick Joe, who is on Mario’s payroll.

Katya and Sofia have a chance encounter at a fruit stand in a scene redolent of the forbidden fruit in the Book of Genesis. They return to the gambling den, where they behave in a sexually suggestive way with each other in front of Goncharov, precipitating an argument between Goncharov and Andrey that soon escalates into a fistfight. Andrey knocks Goncharov unconscious and Goncharov has another dream of his great-grandfather.

Several days later, Andrey and Goncharov have reconciled without explanation. They debate whether or not they can trust Mario, and implicitly also Caterina (who has advised them not to trust Mario). Katya plays piano in the next room, building to a gradual crescendo that joins with the sound of a ticking grandfather clock to drown out the two men’s voices.

Katya stalks Mario to Mass at the Church of Gesù Nuovo, hoping to talk to him afterwards about his plans for his professional relationship with her husband. At the church she is unsettled by a vituperative anti-mafia sermon by the “angry young man” priest FATHER GIANNI. This is intercut with a scene of Goncharov and Andrey at the same fruit stand where Katya and Sofia encountered each other earlier. They have a long discussion about fruit that takes on metaphorical significance about their feelings of displacement in their new country. They then proceed to commit several assassinations for Mario’s Camorra family in quick succession, which continues to be intercut with Father Gianni’s sermon in much the same manner as the assassination/baptism sequence that ends The Godfather. Mario pays close attention to the sermon and is not as visibly unsettled by it as is Katya.

ACT TWO

Andrey and Caterina visit the recently-closed Fontanelle Cemetery, which they believe is their father’s final resting place. They discuss the sense of homelessness and unbelonging that they attribute to their father (flashbacks will later indicate that this may be projection), and Caterina asks Andrey if he thinks Goncharov feels the same way.

Goncharov, meanwhile, tries to locate Mario to discuss the wave of killings with which the previous act concluded. Mario agrees to meet him at a high-end hotel restaurant, but when Goncharov arrives with Katya accompanying him, they are greeted not by Mario himself but by his mother, MARIELLA. Mariella orders enormous quantities of alcohol and very little food, Goncharov attempts to drink her under the table, and Mariella confides in Goncharov and Katya that she feels that in agreeing to meet with them on her son’s behalf she agreed to walk to her death. Goncharov, disturbed at the implication that Mariella thinks he intended to kill Mario, catches something out of the corner of his eye. He orders one last bottle of liquor “for the table” and, when it arrives, pulls out a handgun and shoots it. As Katya and Mariella take cover from the splashing alcohol and flying glass, Goncharov barges back into the kitchen, where he sees Mario escaping out a back doorway into an alley.

Mario leads Goncharov on a long chase through the cramped streets of Naples, but when Goncharov finally tracks him down, Mario acts chummy and darkly humorous, cracking grim jokes and congratulating Goncharov on “finding him out.” Finally Mario tells Goncharov that he has decided that nobody from the Soviet Union has any place in the Camorra and that they can only be subordinates, never partners. Goncharov leaves without replying to him, but Icepick Joe fires at him with a sniper rifle and wings him, badly damaging Goncharov’s dominant arm.

The movie then follows Icepick Joe as he goes home to his flat, attempts to write a scene in a play fictionalizing (and whitewashing) the historical origins of the Camorra, and feeds the neighborhood street cat Dolce. The scenes of Icepick Joe at home are intercut with flashbacks showing his life in a mental institution before relocating to Italy, having been declared “feebleminded” by eugenicist doctors when he was a child prior to World War II. In 1960 he is released from the mental institution after a botched lobotomy and groomed into a life of crime by a member of his extended family who is never named, moving to Italy in 1966.

When the flashbacks and cat-feeding sequences conclude, Icepick Joe goes to confession at a priest’s home (the confessor has the voice of Father Gianni, but is never shown clearly onscreen), is absolved, and wanders Naples at night and into the early morning before falling asleep on the doorstep of a derelict nightclub.

The wounded Goncharov must attend an inconveniently timed meeting with his mysterious backers, who are visiting from the Soviet Union on their way to Latin America. He sends Katya in his place and, in a moment of comic relief that quickly turns dead-serious, she enlists Sofia’s help as a male impersonator to make it look as if Goncharov is present in the conversation but not participating. Unbeknownst to Katya, Sofia has also taken money from Mario and Mariella to provide, or corroborate, false information regarding the efficacy of Goncharov and Andrey’s work for them, in the hope that this will induce the Soviets to withdraw their operations from Naples. Sofia intends to use this money to buy a cruise ship ticket out of Naples so that she can start a new life, much as Goncharov himself is trying to start a new life by relocating from the Soviet Union to Italy.

The two women share a furtive kiss in a dressing room before proceeding to a louche restaurant in which two old, well-dressed Central Asian men grill Katya about the whereabouts of various people whom her husband was meant to have killed. Many of these men were in fact killed in the Act One climax, but Katya does not know this. Sofia, dressed as Goncharov but not particularly plausibly, implies that many of the people Goncharov killed have in fact survived. The two men, infuriated, storm out.

One of the two men, “BRIGHTON BEACH BORIS,” accosts Goncharov at home and demands to know who the “man” with Katya was. Goncharov rises from the bathtub in which he is convalescing and shoots Brighton Beach Boris in a rage. He storms out half-dressed without waiting to see if he has killed Boris. With day breaking, Goncharov wanders Naples screaming Andrey’s name, until he finds and is found by the still-drowsy Icepick Joe. Goncharov returns home with Icepick Joe and falls asleep in his bed, at which point he dreams of his great-grandfather for the third time.

Icepick Joe leaves his flat to feed Dolce; Andrey goes to Goncharov’s flat to tell Katya and Sofia that Goncharov is alive and where they might find him. We see the other Soviet visitor, “IL COMMENDATORE,” whispering orders into Andrey’s ear inGoncharov’s flat after Katya and Sofia leave, intercut with Joe, Katya, and Sofia walking the streets comparing notes on Goncharov’s whereabouts and wellbeing. When Joe, Katya, and Sofia cut through an abandoned construction site on their way back to Joe’s flat, Andrey reappears and opens fire, revealing that he has been instructed to double-cross Goncharov. Katya almost dies in the resulting firefight, but Sofia pulls her to safety and the two women leave Icepick Joe to his fate.

ACT THREE

Andrey, after killing Icepick Joe, has breakfast with Caterina at a restaurant with a panoramic view of the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius. He tells her that he and Goncharov arrived in Naples without any understanding of Mario Ambrosini’s position in the city’s underworld or of his personality. Caterina apologizes and asks if Andrey is sure that Boris and il Commendatore trust him to “clean up the mess”--revealing that Mario’s decision to freeze out the Soviets has made it back to the latter. Andrey assures her that he has their trust, because Goncharov antagonized them by sending Katya to meet with them in his stead and because Caterina gives Andrey a permanent personal relationship in Naples, whereas Goncharov “has no home in this world.”

The movie then begins to escalate to a final showdown between Goncharov and Andrey. Katya and a still badly hurt Goncharov escape from Icepick Joe’s flat and attempt to flee Naples by stealing a boat. During the attempted crossing to Ischia the boat is fired upon; Katya realizes that the prevailing wind is being used to obscure the direction of the gunshots and begins navigating a safe course back towards the mainland. She grounds the boat down the coast from the city and she and Goncharov begin a hard, dreamlike trek overland, finally arriving in the ruins of Pompeii.

Brighton Beach Boris, still alive, has been tracking Goncharov and Katya. Katya notices him and alerts Goncharov, as she initially meant to do with Mario’s driver in Act One. Boris manages to place a phone call to il Commendatore and Andrey before Goncharov shoots him again, this time fatally.

Katya notices that Goncharov’s arm wound has gone septic, endangering the whole limb. She asks him about seeking out a back-alley amputation, a question that escalates into a violent argument when he tells her that he would rather die than lose the ability to shoot. Katya, either afraid of Goncharov or wishing to give him the death he has asked for, fires on her husband, but misses, leading to the famous exchange “I shot you because I love you.”/”If you really loved me, you wouldn’t have missed.”

Andrey and Caterina lead a series of violent reprisals against Mario’s faction, including killing Mariella with a car bomb and Mario himself with a socket wrench. Andrey then sets off for Pompeii for the showdown with Goncharov.

When Andrey arrives, Goncharov asks him to leave Naples together and attempt to leave the criminal underworld. He appeals to their shared childhood in wartime Moscow and seems on the verge of confessing to Andrey that he loves him when Andrey finally opens fire. After a short, brutal fight (guns, then knives, then fists) that Goncharov loses badly, Andrey embraces Goncharov, then shoots him through the head from ear to ear.

Seeing Katya, Andrey attempts to apologize, but Katya simply leaves without a word, as Goncharov did during his earlier confrontation with Mario. Andrey realizes that in killing Goncharov he has killed a part of his own self, the part that always wavers and reinvents and tries to find somewhere to belong. He embraces Goncharov’s dead body in a shot mimicking Ilya Repin’s “Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son.” Then he drives back to Naples in silence to rendezvous with il Commendatore and discuss the problems of succession in the leadership of the Camorra.

Sofia asks Katya to leave Naples with her on a cruise ship, but Katya insists on staying and working to take down Andrey and il Commendatore; she is last seen walking to her death in a standoff with il Commendatore’s goons. Sofia spends most of her time on the cruise trying and failing to finish the first draft of a novel that Katya had started. Finally, she stuffs the fragmentary draft into a wine bottle and casts it out onto the waters of Mare Nostrum, where it slowly fades to the iconic final shot of a running sandglass.

THE END

❦

1993 RERELEASE (INFLUENCED BY LESBIAN AND FEMINIST CRITIQUE IN 1980S AND EARLY 1990S)

ACT ONE

Naples, 1973. A mysterious stranger with a suitcase full of ammunition and counterfeit money arrives from the Soviet Union. He is met at the airport by ANDREY, a man claiming to be his cousin.

Andrey makes introductions for his so-called cousin GONCHAROV with a group of Camorra figures led by MARIO AMBROSINI. Mario invites Goncharov to a gambling den to discuss unspecified “resources” that Goncharov has brought with him from Moscow. Andrey escorts Goncharov to his apartment, where they rendezvous with Goncharov’s wife, KATYA.

That evening, Goncharov and Katya go to the gambling den for the meeting with Mario. While Goncharov and Mario are talking, Katya wanders off and begins flirting with SOFIA, a local woman with a haunted, hardbitten look. Katya and Sofia start drinking, then go out onto a balcony where Katya, drunk, tries to impress Sofia by telling her that she and her husband have been sent to Naples to advance some Soviet political agenda, ambiguously either pro- or anti-regime, pro- or anti-communist. In return, Sofia, who is impressed, tells Katya a secret of her own: she is embezzling money from one of Mario’s front companies, in hopes of leaving Naples and setting up flower shop somewhere else on the Mediterranean.

We cut to MARIO’S DRIVER, who is eavesdropping on them. Noticing his presence, Katya intends to warn her husband. However, Sofia, desperate to stop the information discussed from getting back to either Goncharov or Mario, goads Katya to throw the driver off the balcony to his death instead–the first of many murders in the film. Sofia screams for help; Katya, meanwhile, looks fascinated, drawn in.

Goncharov and Katya leave the casino separately. When Katya arrives back at their apartment, very late and very obviously drunk, Goncharov suspects her of infidelity–but with Andrey, not Sofia. That night, Goncharov dreams of his late great-grandfather.

The next day, Goncharov confides his suspicions about Katya in a near-stranger, the cat-loving Italian-American hit man ICEPICK JOE. Icepick Joe reassures Goncharov and takes him to meet Andrey’s half-sister (through a father who was embedded in an Italian partisan group as a Soviet spy/advisor during the War), CATERINA. Caterina warns Goncharov that he can never entirely trust Mario, who is erratic, paranoid, and xenophobic, and by extension not to trust Icepick Joe, who is on Mario’s payroll.

Katya and Sofia have a chance encounter at a fruit stand in a scene redolent of the forbidden fruit in the Book of Genesis. They return to the gambling den, where they behave in a sexually suggestive way with each other in front of Goncharov, precipitating an argument between Goncharov and Andrey that soon escalates into a fistfight. Andrey knocks Goncharov unconscious and Goncharov has another dream of his great-grandfather.

Several days later, Andrey and Goncharov have reconciled without explanation. They debate whether or not they can trust Mario, and implicitly also Caterina (who has advised them not to trust Mario). Katya plays piano in the next room, building to a gradual crescendo that joins with the sound of a ticking grandfather clock to drown out the two men’s voices.

Katya stalks Mario to Mass at the Church of Gesù Nuovo, hoping to talk to him afterwards about his plans for his professional relationship with her husband. At the church she is unsettled by a vituperative anti-mafia sermon by the “angry young man” priest FATHER GIANNI. This is intercut with a scene of Goncharov and Andrey at the same fruit stand where Katya and Sofia encountered each other earlier. They have a long discussion about fruit that takes on metaphorical significance about their feelings of displacement in their new country. They then proceed to commit several assassinations for Mario’s Camorra family in quick succession, which continues to be intercut with Father Gianni’s sermon in much the same manner as the assassination/baptism sequence that ends The Godfather. Mario pays close attention to the sermon and is not as visibly unsettled by it as is Katya.

ACT TWO

Andrey and Caterina visit the recently-closed Fontanelle Cemetery, which they believe is their father’s final resting place. They discuss the sense of homelessness and unbelonging that they attribute to their father (flashbacks will later indicate that this may be projection), and Caterina asks Andrey if he thinks Goncharov feels the same way.

Goncharov, meanwhile, tries to locate Mario to discuss the wave of killings with which the previous act concluded. Mario agrees to meet him at a high-end hotel restaurant, but when Goncharov arrives with Katya accompanying him, they are greeted not by Mario himself but by his mother, MARIELLA. Mariella orders enormous quantities of alcohol and very little food, Goncharov attempts to drink her under the table, and Mariella confides in Goncharov and Katya that she feels that in agreeing to meet with them on her son’s behalf she agreed to walk to her death. Goncharov, disturbed at the implication that Mariella thinks he intended to kill Mario, catches something out of the corner of his eye. He orders one last bottle of liquor “for the table” and, when it arrives, pulls out a handgun and shoots it. As Katya and Mariella take cover from the splashing alcohol and flying glass, Goncharov barges back into the kitchen, where he sees Mario escaping out a back doorway into an alley.

Mario leads Goncharov on a long chase through the cramped streets of Naples, but when Goncharov finally tracks him down, Mario acts chummy and darkly humorous, cracking grim jokes and congratulating Goncharov on “finding him out.” Finally Mario tells Goncharov that he has decided that nobody from the Soviet Union has any place in the Camorra and that they can only be subordinates, never partners. Goncharov leaves without replying to him, but Icepick Joe fires at him with a sniper rifle and wings him, badly damaging Goncharov’s dominant arm.

The movie then follows Icepick Joe as he goes home to his flat, attempts to write a scene in a play fictionalizing (and whitewashing) the historical origins of the Camorra, and feeds the neighborhood street cat Dolce. He goes to confession at a priest’s home (the confessor has the voice of Father Gianni, but is never shown clearly onscreen), is absolved, and wanders Naples at night and into the early morning before falling asleep on the doorstep of a derelict nightclub.

The wounded Goncharov must attend an inconveniently timed meeting with his mysterious backers, who are visiting from the Soviet Union on their way to Latin America. He sends Katya in his place and, in a moment of comic relief that quickly turns dead-serious, she enlists Sofia’s help as a male impersonator to make it look as if Goncharov is present in the conversation but not participating. The two women share a furtive kiss in a dressing room before proceeding to a louche restaurant in which two old, well-dressed Central Asian men grill Katya about the whereabouts of various people whom her husband was meant to have killed. Many of these men were in fact killed in the Act One climax, but Katya does not know this. The two men, infuriated, storm out.

One of the two men, “BRIGHTON BEACH BORIS,” accosts Goncharov at home and demands to know who the “man” with Katya was. Goncharov rises from the bathtub in which he is convalescing and shoots Brighton Beach Boris in a rage. He storms out half-dressed without waiting to see if he has killed Boris. With day breaking, Goncharov wanders Naples screaming Andrey’s name, until he finds and is found by the still-drowsy Icepick Joe. Goncharov returns home with Icepick Joe and falls asleep in his bed, at which point he dreams of his great-grandfather for the third time.

Icepick Joe leaves his flat to feed Dolce; Andrey goes to Goncharov’s flat to tell Katya and Sofia that Goncharov is alive and where they might find him. We see the other Soviet visitor, “IL COMMENDATORE,” whispering orders into Andrey’s ear inGoncharov’s flat after Katya and Sofia leave, intercut with Joe, Katya, and Sofia walking the streets comparing notes on Goncharov’s whereabouts and wellbeing. When Joe, Katya, and Sofia cut through an abandoned construction site on their way back to Joe’s flat, Andrey reappears and opens fire, revealing that he has been instructed to double-cross Goncharov. Katya almost dies in the resulting firefight, but Sofia pulls her to safety and the two women leave Icepick Joe to his fate.

ACT THREE

Andrey, after killing Icepick Joe, has breakfast with Caterina at a restaurant with a panoramic view of the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius. He tells her that he and Goncharov arrived in Naples without any understanding of Mario Ambrosini’s position in the city’s underworld or of his personality. Caterina apologizes and asks if Andrey is sure that Boris and il Commendatore trust him to “clean up the mess”--revealing that Mario’s decision to freeze out the Soviets has made it back to the latter. Andrey assures her that he has their trust, because Goncharov antagonized them by sending Katya to meet with them in his stead and because Caterina gives Andrey a permanent personal relationship in Naples, whereas Goncharov “has no home in this world.”

The movie then begins to escalate to a final showdown between Goncharov and Andrey. Katya and a still badly hurt Goncharov escape from Icepick Joe’s flat and attempt to flee Naples by stealing a boat. During the attempted crossing to Ischia the boat is fired upon; Katya realizes that the prevailing wind is being used to obscure the direction of the gunshots and begins navigating a safe course back towards the mainland. She grounds the boat down the coast from the city and she and Goncharov begin a hard, dreamlike trek overland, finally arriving in the ruins of Pompeii.

Brighton Beach Boris, still alive, has been tracking Goncharov and Katya. Katya notices him and alerts Goncharov, as she initially meant to do with Mario’s driver in Act One. Boris manages to place a phone call to il Commendatore and Andrey before Goncharov shoots him again, this time fatally.

Katya notices that Goncharov’s arm wound has gone septic, endangering the whole limb. She asks him about seeking out a back-alley amputation, a question that escalates into a violent argument when he tells her that he would rather die than lose the ability to shoot. Katya, either afraid of Goncharov or wishing to give him the death he has asked for, fires on her husband, but misses, leading to the famous exchange “I shot you because I love you.”/”If you really loved me, you wouldn’t have missed.”

Andrey and Caterina lead a series of violent reprisals against Mario’s faction, including killing Mariella with a car bomb and Mario himself with a socket wrench. Andrey then sets off for Pompeii for the showdown with Goncharov.

When Andrey arrives, Goncharov asks him to leave Naples together and attempt to leave the criminal underworld. He appeals to their shared childhood in wartime Moscow and seems on the verge of confessing to Andrey that he loves him when Andrey finally opens fire. After a short, brutal fight (guns, then knives, then fists) that Goncharov loses badly, Andrey embraces Goncharov, then shoots him through the head from ear to ear.

Seeing Katya, Andrey attempts to apologize, but Katya simply leaves without a word, as Goncharov did during his earlier confrontation with Mario. Andrey realizes that in killing Goncharov he has killed a part of his own self, the part that always wavers and reinvents and tries to find somewhere to belong. He embraces Goncharov’s dead body in a shot mimicking Ilya Repin’s “Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son.” Then he drives back to Naples in silence to rendezvous with il Commendatore and discuss the problems of succession in the leadership of the Camorra.

Katya and Sofia leave Naples together on a cruise ship, but are less comfortable with each other than before. Katya spends most of her time on the cruise trying and failing to finish the first draft of a novel. Finally, she stuffs the fragmentary draft into a wine bottle and casts it out onto the waters of Mare Nostrum, where it slowly fades to the iconic final shot of a running sandglass.

THE END

❦

2003 RERELEASE (RESTORES KATYA AND SOFIA’S ORIGINAL ENDINGS; INCLUDES ICEPICK JOE’S BACKSTORY)

ACT ONE

Naples, 1973. A mysterious stranger with a suitcase full of ammunition and counterfeit money arrives from the Soviet Union. He is met at the airport by ANDREY, a man claiming to be his cousin.

Andrey makes introductions for his so-called cousin GONCHAROV with a group of Camorra figures led by MARIO AMBROSINI. Mario invites Goncharov to a gambling den to discuss unspecified “resources” that Goncharov has brought with him from Moscow. Andrey escorts Goncharov to his apartment, where they rendezvous with Goncharov’s wife, KATYA.

That evening, Goncharov and Katya go to the gambling den for the meeting with Mario. While Goncharov and Mario are talking, Katya wanders off and begins flirting with SOFIA, a local woman with a haunted, hardbitten look. Katya and Sofia start drinking, then go out onto a balcony where Katya, drunk, tries to impress Sofia by telling her that she and her husband have been sent to Naples to advance some Soviet political agenda, ambiguously either pro- or anti-regime, pro- or anti-communist. In return, Sofia, who is impressed, tells Katya a secret of her own: she is embezzling money from one of Mario’s front companies, in hopes of leaving Naples and setting up flower shop somewhere else on the Mediterranean.

We cut to MARIO’S DRIVER, who is eavesdropping on them. Noticing his presence, Katya intends to warn her husband. However, Sofia, desperate to stop the information discussed from getting back to either Goncharov or Mario, goads Katya to throw the driver off the balcony to his death instead–the first of many murders in the film. Sofia screams for help; Katya, meanwhile, looks fascinated, drawn in.

Goncharov and Katya leave the casino separately. When Katya arrives back at their apartment, very late and very obviously drunk, Goncharov suspects her of infidelity–but with Andrey, not Sofia. That night, Goncharov dreams of his late great-grandfather.

The next day, Goncharov confides his suspicions about Katya in a near-stranger, the cat-loving Italian-American hit man ICEPICK JOE. Icepick Joe reassures Goncharov and takes him to meet Andrey’s half-sister (through a father who was embedded in an Italian partisan group as a Soviet spy/advisor during the War), CATERINA. Caterina warns Goncharov that he can never entirely trust Mario, who is erratic, paranoid, and xenophobic, and by extension not to trust Icepick Joe, who is on Mario’s payroll.

Katya and Sofia have a chance encounter at a fruit stand in a scene redolent of the forbidden fruit in the Book of Genesis. They return to the gambling den, where they behave in a sexually suggestive way with each other in front of Goncharov, precipitating an argument between Goncharov and Andrey that soon escalates into a fistfight. Andrey knocks Goncharov unconscious and Goncharov has another dream of his great-grandfather.

Several days later, Andrey and Goncharov have reconciled without explanation. They debate whether or not they can trust Mario, and implicitly also Caterina (who has advised them not to trust Mario). Katya plays piano in the next room, building to a gradual crescendo that joins with the sound of a ticking grandfather clock to drown out the two men’s voices.

Katya stalks Mario to Mass at the Church of Gesù Nuovo, hoping to talk to him afterwards about his plans for his professional relationship with her husband. At the church she is unsettled by a vituperative anti-mafia sermon by the “angry young man” priest FATHER GIANNI. This is intercut with a scene of Goncharov and Andrey at the same fruit stand where Katya and Sofia encountered each other earlier. They have a long discussion about fruit that takes on metaphorical significance about their feelings of displacement in their new country. They then proceed to commit several assassinations for Mario’s Camorra family in quick succession, which continues to be intercut with Father Gianni’s sermon in much the same manner as the assassination/baptism sequence that ends The Godfather. Mario pays close attention to the sermon and is not as visibly unsettled by it as is Katya.

ACT TWO

Andrey and Caterina visit the recently-closed Fontanelle Cemetery, which they believe is their father’s final resting place. They discuss the sense of homelessness and unbelonging that they attribute to their father (flashbacks will later indicate that this may be projection), and Caterina asks Andrey if he thinks Goncharov feels the same way.

Goncharov, meanwhile, tries to locate Mario to discuss the wave of killings with which the previous act concluded. Mario agrees to meet him at a high-end hotel restaurant, but when Goncharov arrives with Katya accompanying him, they are greeted not by Mario himself but by his mother, MARIELLA. Mariella orders enormous quantities of alcohol and very little food, Goncharov attempts to drink her under the table, and Mariella confides in Goncharov and Katya that she feels that in agreeing to meet with them on her son’s behalf she agreed to walk to her death. Goncharov, disturbed at the implication that Mariella thinks he intended to kill Mario, catches something out of the corner of his eye. He orders one last bottle of liquor “for the table” and, when it arrives, pulls out a handgun and shoots it. As Katya and Mariella take cover from the splashing alcohol and flying glass, Goncharov barges back into the kitchen, where he sees Mario escaping out a back doorway into an alley.

Mario leads Goncharov on a long chase through the cramped streets of Naples, but when Goncharov finally tracks him down, Mario acts chummy and darkly humorous, cracking grim jokes and congratulating Goncharov on “finding him out.” Finally Mario tells Goncharov that he has decided that nobody from the Soviet Union has any place in the Camorra and that they can only be subordinates, never partners. Goncharov leaves without replying to him, but Icepick Joe fires at him with a sniper rifle and wings him, badly damaging Goncharov’s dominant arm.

The movie then follows Icepick Joe as he goes home to his flat, attempts to write a scene in a play fictionalizing (and whitewashing) the historical origins of the Camorra, and feeds the neighborhood street cat Dolce. The scenes of Icepick Joe at home are intercut with flashbacks showing his life in a mental institution before relocating to Italy, having been declared “feebleminded” by eugenicist doctors when he was a child prior to World War II. In 1960 he is released from the mental institution after a botched lobotomy and groomed into a life of crime by a member of his extended family who is never named, moving to Italy in 1966.

When the flashbacks and cat-feeding sequences conclude, Icepick Joe goes to confession at a priest’s home (the confessor has the voice of Father Gianni, but is never shown clearly onscreen), is absolved, and wanders Naples at night and into the early morning before falling asleep on the doorstep of a derelict nightclub.

The wounded Goncharov must attend an inconveniently timed meeting with his mysterious backers, who are visiting from the Soviet Union on their way to Latin America. He sends Katya in his place and, in a moment of comic relief that quickly turns dead-serious, she enlists Sofia’s help as a male impersonator to make it look as if Goncharov is present in the conversation but not participating. Unbeknownst to Katya, Sofia has also taken money from Mario and Mariella to provide, or corroborate, false information regarding the efficacy of Goncharov and Andrey’s work for them, in the hope that this will induce the Soviets to withdraw their operations from Naples. Sofia intends to use this money to buy a cruise ship ticket out of Naples so that she can start a new life, much as Goncharov himself is trying to start a new life by relocating from the Soviet Union to Italy.

The two women share a furtive kiss in a dressing room before proceeding to a louche restaurant in which two old, well-dressed Central Asian men grill Katya about the whereabouts of various people whom her husband was meant to have killed. Many of these men were in fact killed in the Act One climax, but Katya does not know this. Sofia, dressed as Goncharov but not particularly plausibly, implies that many of the people Goncharov killed have in fact survived. The two men, infuriated, storm out.

One of the two men, “BRIGHTON BEACH BORIS,” accosts Goncharov at home and demands to know who the “man” with Katya was. Goncharov rises from the bathtub in which he is convalescing and shoots Brighton Beach Boris in a rage. He storms out half-dressed without waiting to see if he has killed Boris. With day breaking, Goncharov wanders Naples screaming Andrey’s name, until he finds and is found by the still-drowsy Icepick Joe. Goncharov returns home with Icepick Joe and falls asleep in his bed, at which point he dreams of his great-grandfather for the third time.

Icepick Joe leaves his flat to feed Dolce; Andrey goes to Goncharov’s flat to tell Katya and Sofia that Goncharov is alive and where they might find him. We see the other Soviet visitor, “IL COMMENDATORE,” whispering orders into Andrey’s ear inGoncharov’s flat after Katya and Sofia leave, intercut with Joe, Katya, and Sofia walking the streets comparing notes on Goncharov’s whereabouts and wellbeing. When Joe, Katya, and Sofia cut through an abandoned construction site on their way back to Joe’s flat, Andrey reappears and opens fire, revealing that he has been instructed to double-cross Goncharov. Katya almost dies in the resulting firefight, but Sofia pulls her to safety and the two women leave Icepick Joe to his fate.

ACT THREE

Andrey, after killing Icepick Joe, has breakfast with Caterina at a restaurant with a panoramic view of the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius. He tells her that he and Goncharov arrived in Naples without any understanding of Mario Ambrosini’s position in the city’s underworld or of his personality. Caterina apologizes and asks if Andrey is sure that Boris and il Commendatore trust him to “clean up the mess”--revealing that Mario’s decision to freeze out the Soviets has made it back to the latter. Andrey assures her that he has their trust, because Goncharov antagonized them by sending Katya to meet with them in his stead and because Caterina gives Andrey a permanent personal relationship in Naples, whereas Goncharov “has no home in this world.”

The movie then begins to escalate to a final showdown between Goncharov and Andrey. Katya and a still badly hurt Goncharov escape from Icepick Joe’s flat and attempt to flee Naples by stealing a boat. During the attempted crossing to Ischia the boat is fired upon; Katya realizes that the prevailing wind is being used to obscure the direction of the gunshots and begins navigating a safe course back towards the mainland. She grounds the boat down the coast from the city and she and Goncharov begin a hard, dreamlike trek overland, finally arriving in the ruins of Pompeii.

Brighton Beach Boris, still alive, has been tracking Goncharov and Katya. Katya notices him and alerts Goncharov, as she initially meant to do with Mario’s driver in Act One. Boris manages to place a phone call to il Commendatore and Andrey before Goncharov shoots him again, this time fatally.

Katya notices that Goncharov’s arm wound has gone septic, endangering the whole limb. She asks him about seeking out a back-alley amputation, a question that escalates into a violent argument when he tells her that he would rather die than lose the ability to shoot. Katya, either afraid of Goncharov or wishing to give him the death he has asked for, fires on her husband, but misses, leading to the famous exchange “I shot you because I love you.”/”If you really loved me, you wouldn’t have missed.”

Andrey and Caterina lead a series of violent reprisals against Mario’s faction, including killing Mariella with a car bomb and Mario himself with a socket wrench. Andrey then sets off for Pompeii for the showdown with Goncharov.

When Andrey arrives, Goncharov asks him to leave Naples together and attempt to leave the criminal underworld. He appeals to their shared childhood in wartime Moscow and seems on the verge of confessing to Andrey that he loves him when Andrey finally opens fire. After a short, brutal fight (guns, then knives, then fists) that Goncharov loses badly, Andrey embraces Goncharov, then shoots him through the head from ear to ear.

Seeing Katya, Andrey attempts to apologize, but Katya simply leaves without a word, as Goncharov did during his earlier confrontation with Mario. Andrey realizes that in killing Goncharov he has killed a part of his own self, the part that always wavers and reinvents and tries to find somewhere to belong. He embraces Goncharov’s dead body in a shot mimicking Ilya Repin’s “Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son.” Then he drives back to Naples in silence to rendezvous with il Commendatore and discuss the problems of succession in the leadership of the Camorra.

Il Commendatore sends an assassin after Katya, but Sofia, who is visiting Katya to console her about Goncharov’s death, takes the bullet for her. With her last breath, Sofia offers Katya the cruise ship ticket that she bought with the money Mario and Mariella gave her for precipitating Goncharov’s fall. Katya accepts the ticket, feigns willingness to become il Commendatore’s mistress, and poisons him.

Katya spends most of her time on the cruise ship trying and failing to write the first draft of a novel. Finally, she stuffs the fragmentary draft into a wine bottle and casts it out onto the waters of Mare Nostrum, where it slowly fades to the iconic final shot of a running sandglass.

THE END