Left Field Cinema

There is an old Chinese proverb: “Three may keep a secret, so long as two are dead”, Paolo Sorrentino’s sophomore feature film, The Consequences of Love, presents its own spin on this truism: “When two people know a secret, it’s no longer a secret.” Total isolation of the truth is the only way to keep the truth concealed and this sense of isolation extends into various facets of Sorrentino’s film - characters, visuals and narrative. Perhaps the greatest achievement of The Consequences of Love is that it manages to maintain its protagonist’s detached and coldly remote life without ever compromising the audience’s interest in him or his journey. The protagonist in question is Titta di Girolamo (Toni Servillo), an Italian who lives in a Swiss hotel which he rarely leaves except to occasionally deliver a huge suitcase of money to a nearby bank. He spends most of his days in the hotel bar or a local shopping centre which is almost entirely empty. He plays cards with other residents and occasionally calls his disinterested family but otherwise forgoes any contact with the outside world. Our fascination with this enigmatic central character is what holds the film together; he narrates the proceedings conveying almost total boredom with his life and explaining how he has no imagination, he describes his meticulous and repetitive routine with all the unenthusiastic atonality of a man who has completely accepted that life will offer him no further joys. He keeps everyone at a distance, sits quietly most of the time and when he is forced to interact with another individual it feels like a severe inconvenience. But behind the veneer of total control is a man on the edge of radical behaviour. He eavesdrops on his neighbors every night using a stethoscope, he habitually uses heroin once a week at exactly the same time and is an insomniac. He describes sleep as an obsession, although this obsession doesn’t guide the story, nor does his substance abuse, the one time he deviates from his carefully planned weekly heroin session is significant but has no lasting consequences. Truly the only factor in his life that will have consequences is love, as the title suggests. Soon it is revealed that Titta works for the Mafia, he’d previously lost a substantial sum of the Mafia’s money via poor financial investing and is now living in exile, imprisoned in this anonymous hotel as punishment for this mistake - his only job is to deliver the money to the bank. The Mafia didn’t kill him because they knew he’d made a genuine error, but arguably they did something far worse to him - they stole his life. He refuses to underestimate the consequences of love, as he writes on his notepad, perhaps it is love that got him into this situation in the first place (a possibility only briefly and subtextually hinted at with a POV flashback to his wedding day, where just after the couple have said their vows his wife’s unhappy face can clearly be seen) as a result he completely ignores Sofia (Olivia Magnani) the waitress working in the hotel bar, although secretly he desires her and has perhaps fallen in love with her. Things change when Titta’s brother turns up, the virtual opposite of Titta, shabbily dressed and groomed, an extrovert who is not afraid to interact with the opposite sex, although Titta resents his brief presence, it is unmistakably his brother’s example which pushes Titta towards talking to Sofia for the first time. In one of the films more memorable moments Titta takes a stool at the bar for the first time and address’ Sofia saying that this action is possibly the most dangerous thing he’s ever done in his life. This slyly seductive opening line holds a nugget of truth, by interrupting his routine he seems to have upset the cosmic balance as his life is subsequently invaded by two hitmen arriving at his hotel room, hitmen he must accommodate while they dispatch a local target. Meanwhile a subplot runs in parallel, focusing on the pair of hotel residents Titta spies on. A rich couple who have lost their wealth due to the husbands gambling and who only have enough money to see out the rest of their lives together in relative comfort. Titta humiliates the husband in front of other hotel residents by revealing that he’s cheating during a card game, an action that may completely destroy the couple’s relationship as the wife feels shame at her husbands actions. The relevance of this subplot only becomes clear in the films final scenes as both plot strands converge in an unexpected way.

Sorrentino combines all the elements of cinema with an elegant efficiency and unmistakable slickness. Story, performances, editing, music and photography all come together with uncommon harmony. Sorrentino’s first film One Man Up (2001), his most recent film released in the UK Il Divo (2008) and his current production, the USA set This Must Be the Place (2011) all star Toni Servillo and he’s clearly an actor that Sorrentino works well with. Indeed the absence of Servillo in Sorrentino’s other gangster themed film, The Family Friend (2006), is commonly viewed as the reason why that film is less revered than The Consequences of Love or Il Divo. Servillo manages to convey a wealth of emotion in the subtlest of facial expressions, he posses a rare and magnetic screen presence, how he moves his head or dips his eyes, a blank look gives way to an ocean of sorrow hidden beneath. His work on Il Divo and Gomorra (2008) is equally nuanced making him one of the most impressive actors working in Europe today. In congress with Servillo’s performance is the films art design, the immaculate but anonymous spatial constructs, the locations, the sets, the props and the costumes are all perfectly combined. Even the graffiti on the walls of the city square are matching and reflect one another from opposite sides. Sorrentino creates a vacuous world for Tatti to exist within, a world that is as empty as it is boring. Sorrentino presents this world via Luca Bigazzi’s stunning cinematography, his camera moves are measured and perfectly timed. At first the camera’s movements seem to be unmotivated by the action in the frame, simply for their unorthodox framing and somewhat radical timing with the action, but actually if we inspect the cinematography closer every single movement is motivated by the action, it’s just executed in an unexpected fashion. The opening image of the film for example sees a delivery man for the Mafia standing alone on on an airport autopedescalator, the wide frame holds the entire length of this human conveyer, it remains resolutely static until just before the man arrives at its end when the camera slowly tracks to the right motivated by the mans closer proximity to the lens. Two stand-out shots involve prolonged and elaborate set-ups: a scene in the last act of the film sees Titta escorted into a lift, the lift descends several floors, Titta exits the lift and makes his way through various intersecting corridors of a vast hotel before arriving at a giant conference room, he travels the length of the room to his destination at the other end and then a five minute dialogue scene ensues between him and a prominent Mafia boss. All of this action is covered in one single uninterrupted take, one that two other gangster movie directors, Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese, would be proud to claim as their own. An earlier shot depicts the moment when Titta breaks his heroin schedule for the first time, the camera’s lens tracks in on Titta from behind before climbing over his head so that it presents Titta’s face upside down, Titta then slowly descends onto the bed, the camera descends with him, tracking back across his body before arriving at his head again, which now hangs over the edge of the bed. This outstanding sequence effortlessly conveys Titta’s loss of control as we see his world through a perspective we’re not used to.

Original music by Pasquale Catalano is combined with a very deliberate selection of largely electronic and alternative dance music which might at first seem odd for a film about a middle aged man. The choices in music may date the film in the future in the same way as so many 1980’s soundtracks seem dated and cheesy now - time will tell on that front. The music is, however, of paramount importance to the films edit. Giogio Franchini allows the film to breathe for most of its runtime but occasionally interrupts this meditative pace with rapid editing, most unkindly the money delivery scenes appear almost like the slickest of car adverts, his perfectly timed release of the car alarm and exit from the hotels underground car park in his young and perfectly maintained business car seem to be at odds with the rest of the films content, until, that is, the sequence is repeated and the routine is rudely interrupted by a lift at the bank not arriving in time. If there is a flaw in Franchini’s editing it is that he too frequently relies on one particular editorial trick, interrupting the music by a loud diegetic noise, but this is a minor complaint. Other more significant flaws in the film originate with the script and direction, a central relationship between a young stunningly beautiful woman and an unattractive middle aged man always sniffs of male sexual fantasy (are there no middle-aged women in this world?). Sofia’s tendency to undress in front of Titta is easily the most misjudged of moments in the film (perhaps this is more commonplace on mainland Europe!). I’ve recently made a similar complaint about Theo Angelopoulos’ The Beekeeper; these complaints do not stem from prudishness but rather a desire to see equality within cinema – when rounded male characters like Titta are constantly allowed to be grey, ugly and dressed why is it that one-dimensional female characters like Sofia are constantly asked to be youthful, beautiful and stripped bare? The climax of Sofia’s storyline also seems like a tacked on solution to a script problem rather than an organic part of the story. Another flaw in the film is during one of the only sequences where the action completely leaves Titta behind as the two visiting hitmen carry out their assassination. The assassination is distinctive and detailed (one hitman must continually push his glasses up, and sound design uses the correct volume for guns with silencers, so quiet that the shells hitting the ground are louder than the shot itself). But the sequence in no way affects Titta and feels more like Sorrentino fulfilling an ‘action beat’ in his screenplay.

These flaws with the film are however washed away by a truly unexpected climax where the enigma of the central character becomes fully formed. His motives are often far from clear and even at the end he makes a choice that few in the audience will see coming, but one that makes sense upon reflection of his previous actions. The final scene of the film sweetly recognises that although we are frequently isolated from the ones we love, we are still in their minds and hearts even when we’re nowhere near them. Perhaps this knowledge is enough to deal with the consequences of love.

M.Dawson