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aka - Conseguenze Dell'amore, Le
Italy 2004
Directed by
Paolo Sorrentino
102 minutes
Rated M

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
4 stars

The Consequences Of Love

Much of the appeal of Paolo Sorrentino’s film is embodied in the opening credits with their sparse elegant typeface which play out over the minimalist image of a single male being carried along from far to middle distance by a slowly moving walkway in windowless, rigorously rectangular and apparently subterranean space.

The credits end with us seeing that the male is a hotel porter pulling a black suitcase along with him and so the story starts of Titta Di Girolamo (Toni Servillo) a mysteriously taciturn, expensively-attired man living in Swiss hotel fastidiously adhering to a routine that amounts to little more than taking a huge amount of cash money (the contents of the above-mentioned suitcase) to be deposited in a bank, injecting himself once a week with heroin and playing the occasional game of cards with some elderly fellow-occupants of the hotel.

To describe Titta as an existentially-alienated individual is somewhat of an understatement and Sorrentino’s film is both an explanation of how he became so and what he finally does to break out of this condition as a result of his decision to reach out to a pretty barmaid in the hotel (Olivia Magnani, the grand-daughter of Italian screen legend Anna Magnani), an act to which the film’s title refers.   

Lensed by Luca Bigazzi who would become Sorrentino’s regular cinematographer, the film is visually irresistibly seductive. Servillo holds our attention as the morose, seemingly affectless protagonist, his occasional voice-over revealing the depth of his estrangement and haunted loneliness, with the director keeping the pace of the film as unvarying as the moving walkway we saw at the film’s opening. In the last act the pace quickens and somewhat surprisingly, the film morphs into a full-figured crime drama with a fatalistic resolution. But don't let this fool you, The Consequences Of Love is a film in which style and attitude rule, action comes a very distant second.

 

 

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