The title of the young Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino’s second feature film, Le Conseguenze Dell’Amore (The Consequences of Love), released in 2004, does have a Bergman-like feel to it. But the ethereally beautiful opening shot is more Kubrick-ish, Tarkovsky-esque, and a la Leone.
In a sterile white interior, a lone figure appears on screen, in extreme long shot, riding a travelator moving in a snail’s pace, with a suitcase beside him. Even though we are yet to meet the film’s protagonist, that single long take presages a lot about him. In one deft touch, Sorrentino tells us we are about to encounter loneliness, an ascetic existence, and a life that appears to have transformed into an automaton so much so that it needs external assistance even in moving along.
When we do meet the protagonist, Titta di Girolamo (a brilliantly understated and restrained performance by the noted Italian theatre director and actor, Toni Servillo), seated at the lobby of a plush hotel in Lugano, Switzerland, a voice-over tells us ‘I am not a frivolous man’. That declaration can be considered redundant. For one glance at this stoic, scowling, sartorially elegant bespectacled and balding man, cigarette in hand, with his back half turned towards us and towards life, is all that it takes to make us realise the same.
Sorrentino also introduces us to Sofia (played by Olivia Magnani, granddaughter of the legendary Italian actress Anna Magnani, who had starred in films by Roberto Rossellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini, among others), who works as a maid at the hotel’s bar. When we first lay our eyes on the young Sofia, she has a shaker in her hand, symbolising that soon she will be shaking up someone’s placid personality.
For one brief moment, we believe that these two character’s eyes have met—thereby materialising a connection that we can feel palpably—only to find that she is staring at a horse-drawn hearse through the lobby window. While the shot at the travelator set the scene for the film, the hearse, as we shall find out, portends to its conclusion.
Titta seems to have little regard for the saying: ‘Solitude is a good place to visit, but a bad place to stay in’. While to most of us, a hotel is our temporary abode, for this non-descript, taciturn, insomniac from Salerno in south-western Italy, a hotel room has been his home for eight long years.
His routine is as unwavering as his suits are impeccable. For six days a week, he sits at a corner table in the hotel lobby, observing the various guests at the hotel, ignoring interaction with any other individual, except when forced to do so. Titta is a man who has become so unaccustomed to living that when he is forced to converse with someone else, he peppers his sentences with philosophical ditties, while avoiding any reply that would throw light on his life by stating ‘The truth, my friend, is boring.’ Only for a day every week, does he leave his gilded cage, carrying with him a bag full of money to the bank. Ironically, for a man who steers clear of all sort of human interaction, at the bank he insists that the money be counted by hand, and not by a machine, stating that ‘We must never lose faith in our fellow men’.
Rude to the point of brushing aside a chambermaid’s polite queries with stern silence, we find Titta in others’ company only when he is sharing the table with hotel hermits like him, playing a game of cards. Two of his fellow players are Carlo (Raffaele Pisu) and his wife Isabella (Angela Goodwin)—the former owners of the same hotel. Due to Carlo’s gambling habits they have lost it all and have now been relegated to only a room in the establishment.
Like every man, Titta, too, has a few ‘unmentionable secrets’ in his life. One secret is that every night he eavesdrops on the conversations of Carlo and Isabella—by placing a stethoscope on their common door—hearing Carlo lamenting the spectacular life they once led and wishing for a spectacular death. There are two more secrets—one regarding the origin of the suitcase full of money and the other about a particular habit that Titta has cultivated for more than two decades.
Titta’s monotonous, meticulous, and morbid non-life is shaken to the core the day a visibly upset Sofia approaches his table and demands an answer as to why for two long years he has refrained from responding to her ‘Arrivederci’s (goodbye). The question whether he even acknowledges the fact that she exists seems to rattle Titta’s own existence of anonymity. That is when we see a faint smile on his face for the first time. Later, when he perches himself on a bar stool and tells Sofia that it is one of the most ‘dangerous’ things he has ever done, we, too, like her cannot suppress a smile.
The two go out shopping, he buys her an extravagant gift with the sole purpose of taking their relationship to the next level, and they even have a lovers’ tiff. A man who firmly believes in the saying that once someone knows a secret, it isn’t a secret any more finds himself spilling his darkest secrets to Sofia without even batting an eyelid. As he and Sofia seem to be coming closer, we find Carlo and Isabella drifting apart after Titta catches him cheating at cards.
But like all great love stories, fate will intervene in Titta’s tale. In a turn of events that will involve a missing suitcase containing nine million dollars, the Mafia, and hit men, Titta transforms himself from a man devoid of any imagination to one who can outwit even a seasoned Mafia boss.
Though the preceding paragraph seems to indicate that Le Conseguenze Dell’Amore ultimately ends up being a clichéd Italian film full of stereotypical characters and scenario, it actually avoids any such pitfalls.
It is in fact, an existential tragedy, encapsulated by that shot of Titta looking through his hotel room window at a passerby below, who, while engrossed at staring at a female runs straight into a lamppost. It is also, as the title suggests a story of love. Not the usual ‘romantic love’ that we are spoon fed by soppy Hollywood romances, but the love ‘The Fab Four’ from Liverpool spoke about in their song called ‘The End’—‘…and in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make’.
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