The Consequences of Love (Le Conseguenze Dell'Amore) Review

Yet if on Bogart’s death, Jean-Luc Godard could renew the definitive symbol of film noir cool by drawing on French philosophical fiction, then perhaps The Consequences’ director Paulo Sorrentino would be able to reinvigorate the existential hero by placing him within a highly exciting, and yet wholly generic situation. Throughout the first half of the film, Sorrentino cultivates an aura of mystery around Titta in order to prepare us for the onslaught of the world into his life.

We don’t know why Titta lives in a hotel in a foreign country, estranged from his wife, alienated from his kids, misanthropically eschewing human contact and the friendly advances of a beautiful barmaid. His only social activity is the occasional playing of grappa – a game which reminds him of childhood – with a devoted elderly couple on whom he spies, during his insomnia, using a stethoscope. Could it be that he has incarcerated himself to avoid the consequences of love, jealously observing those brave enough to love, whilst imprisoned and accompanied only by his nostalgia? Nor do we understand his job, which apparently consists merely of taking a mysterious suitcase to a bank every week. Is he really the investment banker he claims?

We begin to get clues that Titta isn’t the average philosophical nomad. He keeps a gun concealed within his television set. He habitually intoxicates his blood with smack. As the audience edges closer to uncovering Titta’s secrets, his frustrations and his desire to love grows. It comes to a crescendo when he is visited by his frivolous, lecherous brother, and he is confronted by the barmaid Sofia (Olivia Magnani), who has finally grown weary of Titta’s lack of civility. These events motivate Titta to finally open up to Sofia – to do what he believes is the bravest thing he could possibly do. Titta has refused to be an existential hero: he is now demanding a plot.

Yet, ironically, he also gets another one. One day he enters his room to find it occupied by two mob assassins, and suddenly his love story is interrupted by a need to merely survive. When love and survival are imbricated, it is clear there must be a great, tragic, sacrifice by the end of the film.

Sorrentino’s sudden addition of two conflicting plots to the script clearly provides us with excitement, but it is his philosophical direction of the camera that will truly captivate you. The confinement of Titta allows him the frame to himself, provided that no one should attempt to breach his solitude; he sees the world through mirrors, windows, and he hears it through walls and telephones. Yet every consequence of love, every humanism, is shot with swishing pans and fast tracks that intersect then disconnect characters’ perceptions. The camera is also wary of getting too close to Titta should it feel discomfited by his actions. There’s a lot of Scorsese’s technique for filming subjectivity in Sorrentino’s style; but Scorsese made the Russian existential hero fashionable again, just as Sorrentino restores the European.

We are also fascinated by the retrospective consequences of love that plague Titta. A careless word recalls music and relationships of the distant past – it’s seized by a rapid tracking shot of course; even the sound of rustling money evokes the sea surrounding the Italian peninsula – there’s no maritime refuge from his land-locked Swiss captivity.

Sorrentino’s heroine trip sound-mixing and dizzying camera movements rival those of Aronofsky or Boyle; the whole screen goes out of focus to reflect a character’s fear; and a scene of instant death at the hands of a mafiosa – himself comically portrayed as a candy-munching, shell-suit wearer with taped up spectacles – is cut in such a way as to make the audience lurch in shock. A flashback structure that emerges towards the end of the film furthers admiration for the storytelling prowess that Sorrentino exhibits.

Finally it is necessary to praise Toni Servillo for his portrayal of Titta. Although he initially plays the role with an emotionless, misanthropic poker-playing detachment; his witty voiceover providing us with our few clues as to his personality, this Mediterranean Woody Allen look-alike progressively inscribes more neuroses and insecurities onto his face as love and the world invade his seclusion.

By the end of the picture we are fully aware of the consequences of love. Like all existentialist fiction, a plot takes us from a wry account of observation of a universe of potential companions and disparate lives, and into the real world of the other. The consequences of love, be they romantic, for friends or for humanity, are invariably attached with terrible tragedy, suffering and forfeit. Yet it is what makes life, and the cinema, so very exciting.

Review by Nick Sigley.