The Consequences of Love

seen on 5 October 2019

This film from 2004 is part of Norton Street's Italian Film Festival (in Sydney); its original title is Le conseguenza dell'amore. It is directed by Paolo Sorrentino and features Toni Servillo as Titta de Girolamo and Olivia Magnani as Sofia.

Titta lives in a hotel in Lugano and appears completely withdrawn from life - his routine is unwavering and solitary, apart from regular card games with a once-wealthy aristocratic couple, and some desultory conversations with the hotel manager. He does not respond to greetings from the hotel staff, even the attractive Sofia who works at the bar and in whom he is apparently interested.

The situation is presented in a series of scenes in which Titta's point of view is the focus, but his disengagement is emphasised by his inscrutable expression and long silences and lack of responsiveness to any attempt to engage him in conversation. The mysterious scene enacted during the opening credits - a shot of a man with a suitcase travelling on a moving walkway, filmed from the near end of the walkway so that at first the man hardly seems to be moving - is eventually explained when we see an uexpected part of Titta's routine, his delivery to a bank of a suitcase of cash which regularly arrives at his hotel room. We also learn that he injects himself with heroin every Wednesday morning at 10 am.

The arrival of Titta's exuberant younger brother jolts him into at last acknowledging Sofia's existence, and a tentative rapprochement begins. Soon after, two Mafiosi turn up and use the hotel room as their base while one of them performs an assassination. This disconcerting episode is linked to the reason for Titta's current existence - he lost Mafia money in an investment that went wrong, and his 'punishment' is to be the courier for the laundered money in the suitcase. However, his routines are about to be seriously destabilised not only by his wary flirtation with Sofia but also by the attempt of the two assassins to steal one of the suitcases of cash.

The film is meticulous and stylish, creating interest in an apparently colourless character whose inner motivations remain baffling and fatalistic. The Mafia connection is sinister without being gratuitously violent; the hesitancy about personal relationships is easily understood once the context of Titta's life is revealed, but the film eschews any conventional development of a romance between Titta and Sofia. She is interested but not gullible, and the one assignation that she makes fails to materialise because she has a car accident. There is nobody to connect the two characters, and so Titta does not know about this and assumes that he has been jilted.

It's quite a perplexing film, largely because the central character is opaque, and the story ultimately bleak. The cinematography by Luca Bigazzi is stylish; Titta is very well played, so that his silences and reserve are not boring, though they would normally be highly risky as the main focus of a film. Somehow, themes which might generate conventional narratives of action, suspense or romance do not develop, but this is a matter of deflating one's expectations of a film by choosing not to take advantage of filmic stereotypes. It is not certain how the title relates to the film, since there is not much love on display to have consequences, and Titta's final course of action is largely a consequence of his own intolerable position.