tailing 2ideas A stylish story-telling. Dramatic like Malèna but with the eroticism toned down. Dialogues are focused because director Paolo Sorrentino is hellbent to make spoken words as limited as possible.Introvert Titta di Girolamo from Southern Italy lives alone at a hotel in Switzerland, confined by the mafia. Everyone is curious about his profession. He is shown as the one of those uptight people who hardly utters a word and lacks in imagination. Everything is fine and smooth with his life until he falls in love with a barmaid. Since the movie is Italian and mentions little of Mafiosi, I expected guns and tragic scenes. And the fun is that the film-maker managed to twist around everything we know of clichés about Mafioso. Does the barmaid reciprocate and fill his life with something exciting? Girolamo wrestles with insomnia and hopes to find courage to get out of the prison kind of life.An irony of a scene comes up somewhere in the beginning. Girolamo shares a quiet dinner with a couple who is his neighbour. The narration shows that bitterness corroded the husband's life as he exclaims to his wife: I was immoral and wicked and I ruined your life. You know what frightens me most? Dying of old age, I want to die an extraordinary death. And right at that moment his wife hands him a pill and says: You've got to take this now, Carlo.There's another scene of the old couple. The husband tells her woman they should holiday to Cambodia and so, she asks where would they get the money. He replies that he will sell off the painting gifted by her mother. She retorts that the painting is the last sign of her mother. To this he gets angry: Your materialism revolts me. You're just a petit bourgeios. All this time, Girolamo had been listening to them with a stethoscope held to an adjoining door between them.I just love verses being read out. Here in the movie, a young woman who happened to occupy Girolamo's favourite seat reads out a beautiful verse about love to her friend. With the barmaid behind him, it seems like the situation is telling him to do something but he just stands there.The soundtrack of the movie suits exactly. Songs fill up the silences in the movie for the film-maker was aiming to make the conversations dramatic and indeed he did pull it off. A mesmerising Italian song closer at the end. (I don't know the duo who sang this) Some lines go like this…You need passion,…lots of patience…raspberry syrup… And a touch of recklessness. You need a pound of…your own ability…Latin sensuality and a little distance. That's how you make it, lipstick and chocolate… and not to eat them would be a shame. That's how you do it over low heat… stirring, with lots of feeling.Watch it but don't expect the Mafiosi fanfare. Or for that matter, don't expect nitty-gritty stuff like Gomorrah.

Sindre Kaspersen Italian screenwriter and director Paolo Sorrentino's second feature film which he wrote, premiered In competition at the 57th Cannes International Film Festival in 2004, was shot on locations in Italy and is an Italian production which was produced by producers Domenico Procacci, Nicola Giuliano, Francesca Cima and Angelo Curti. It tells the story about a middle-aged man named Titta De Girolamo who has lived in a anonymous hotel in Switzerland during the last eight years. Titta is a well dressed and short-spoken man who has maintained an ice-cold facade for a long time and who spends his days at the hotel's bar and lobby where he distantly observes the personnel and the guests, but his life alters the day he unexpectedly allows himself to become interested in a young and attractive bartender named Sofia.Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino had made a number of short films before he in 2001 made his debut feature film "One Man Up" and he received international recognition three years later with his next narrative feature. Within the 100 passing minutes this piece of art lasts, times existence disappears and one's eyes is magnetically drawn towards Paolo Sorrentino's minimalistic vision of an esoteric character's monotone and ritualistic life at a hotel where colorful individuals live in a spiral of repetitive behavior. Through the protagonist's point of view, a reflective voice-over narration, sterling production design by Italian production designer Lino Fiorito, cinematography by Italian cinematographer Luca Bigazzi and a great score by Italian composer Pasquale Catalano, Paolo Sorrentino depicts a refined study of character about a nostalgic and introvert 49-year-old man who against his own principles let's the light into his life at the moment he establishes communication with an accommodating woman who has spent two years trying to declare her existence to him. This fascinating play with perspectives which almost exclusively takes place at a hotel, becomes a distinct film experience much due to Paolo Sorrentino's characteristic use of close-ups, repetitions, slow-motion scenes, long takes and sequences with rapid editing where the music is impressively well calculated, and is impelled and reinforced by it's cogent narrative structure, quiet though intensifying continuity, cinematographic expertise, aesthetic depiction of an almost mechanical upper class milieu, synoptic screenplay, quick-witted dialog and the understated and convincing acting performances by Italian actor Toni Servillo and Italian actress Olivia Magnani. An existential drama, an unconventional love fable, a thriller, a neo-noir or a gangster drama, Paolo Sorrentino's genre mix is well-constructed and this ingenious work is inspiring cinematic creativity from the innovating opening scene to the stylized ending. A brilliant exercise of style and form where image, sound, movement, figure of speech and narration is sublimely incorporated.

patrick-bliss-1 The opening shot of the Consequences of Love perfectly sets up this intriguing and absorbing film. A travellator slowly carries a solitary out of focus figure towards the camera, trailing a huge suitcase behind him. Like the central character in the film, we know nothing of him and our initial interpretation of him, his profession, the contents of the suitcase could be way off the mark.Consequences of Love is that kind of film. From the title you might expect a Bergmanesq dissection of a relationship. What we have instead is a lead character, Titta, living life in emotional exile, seemingly choosing to cut himself off from those around him. If the film can be classified in any way, I would call it a mystery, as we are engaged in working out who Titta is and what he is about. What we know from the start is he is 50'ish, cool, composed and expensively attired. He has lived for the last eight years in a plush looking Swiss hotel, always paying his room fee on time but seldom showing any interest in the staff or other guests.His only real companions are a couple who he plays occasional card games with. The couple, it transpires, used to own the hotel but have now gambled everything away and have only the room they live in left. Their love of money, antiques and each other was their undoing and Titta seems to identify with their plight. He once had it all, but now is now living as a virtual prisoner in the hotel. His brother, a long haired surf instructor, drops in to see him occasionally, but he sees his visits as more of an intrusion than a pleasure. They talk about the person Titta considers to be his best friend, even though he hasn't seen him for 25 years. This long lost friend is now a telephone engineer, repairing the communication network that brings so many together. Meanwhile Tittas phone calls to his wife and children end quickly when they refuse to speak to him.Midway through the film Titta makes an uncharacteristic move and begins to open up to a young barmaid from the hotel. With his judgement clouded by emotion he sets himself on a course of actions that will ultimately seal his fate for good.The slow unfolding of Tittas fall from grace is and beautifully scripted, shot and scored. The thumping techno soundtrack does much to build up the tension as more and more secrets are revealed, the final half hour turning into a taught thriller as Titta lets his mask slip and must once again face the consequences of his actions. The ending, with a visual nod to Felini, is dramatic yet ambiguous and leaves the audience to once more question his motives.Patrick Bliss, 01/06/06

MarcChrys Very slow, dull, enigmatic film. MAybe the kind of film Jean-Luc Godard would have made had he been Italian. Certainly conveys how tedious, repetitious, joyless and empty a person's life can be, but I don't usually go to the cinema to find that out! The plot (such as it is) doesn't convince. Why a gorgeous hotel receptionist (an exception to the dullness of the film) would be the slightest bit interested in a moody, chain-smoking, silent loner who speaks in 'deep' aphorisms baffles me. Very difficult to feel any sympathy with the main character. One feels like shaking him by the throat and telling him to 'snap out of it!'. His brother is a much more human character. The ending is inconclusive and puzzling. Everyone in the cinema (when I saw the film) went out muttering about how they nearly fell asleep. Of course, it shouldn't have to be a Hollywood Bruce Willis-style 'shhot-em-up' and 'crash-bang' fiesta, but a little bit of energy and action would have made it a lot more thrilling. One of the best Italian films ever?! Pleease...An art-house, curiosity at best.