Customer Reviews

The Consequences of Love ( Le Conseguenze dell'amore ) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - United Kingdom ]

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Director Paolo Sorrentino has made the type of film we don't normally associate with Italy, a film where the characters are, for the most part, a study in icy cool and repressed emotions. This mood suits the sterile, upmarket, Swiss setting, where a middle-aged business man, depressed and uncommunicative to all around him, lives in an expensive hotel, in a boredom only relieved by his dispassionate studying of his fellow-guests and a certain very attractive young waitress at the hotel. I found the film mostly very intriguing. Toni Servillo plays the lead role brilliantly, the photography and direction are first-class and there is an astonishingly adroit use of music and sound-effects throughout the film. The thriller aspect to the story works well, although I think the director aims more for mood and revelations into human nature than a taut, suspenseful plot. In summary, the film's technical accomplishment compensates for any implausibilities in the plot and it is certainly a film worth seeing.

THe consequences of love presents a striking portrayl of isolation and the desire to reengage life. What better way is there to start over in life other than Love. At all cost. Great Film

This is a sad film about a man living in a swiss hotel without friends or even family. You witness the way he plods through life, a non-descript normal man who watches everyone. There is an elderly couple next to him in hard circumstances, with whom he gambles and eavesdrops. They are even sadder than he is. There is also an extraordinary young beauty who works in the bar, who watches him and wonders, trying for some contact for unfathomable reasons. She even partially strips for him in the bar. As I live next to Switzerland, I must say that this perfectly reflects the kind of sterile order that we are accustomed to finding there, a kind of frictionless life so long as you have the money to pay for it. Even the man's glib statements fit perfectly with the static nihilism of the place.

The man's means and reason for living are a mystery. Is he rich? Why is he so estranged from his children and ex-wife? More than half-way thorough the movie, the viewer wants these questions answered, though nothing that interesting could possibly come from, or so one thinks. Then an enigmatic woman delivers a suitcase, which the man takes, now armed, to a swiss bank for processing. We begin to see his life is far more complicated than one assumed. He also hosts some nasty thugs while they are 'on a job'.

With a discrepancy in the amounts counted, the man's life suddenly seems open and even dangerous. He engages with the girl, perhaps wooing her, perhaps out of extreme loneliness. As events unfold, and I do not want to play the spoiler with details, things get very complicated indeed, and the unexpected - in behavior and circumstance - overturn all the assumptions the character makes about their lives. It is surprising, frightening, and sad.

REcommended. This is a quality European thriller.

The middle-aged loner Titta De Girolamo has lived in a anonymous hotel in Switzerland during the last eight years. He is a well dressed and short-spoken man who spends his days at the hotels bar and lobby, where he distantly observes the personnel and the guests. Titta has maintained an ice-cold facade for a long time, but it starts cracking the day he unexpectedly lets himself become interested in the attractive bartender Sofia.

Italian director and screenwriter Paolo Sorrentino had made a number of short films before he in 2001 made his feature film debut "One man up". He received international recognition three years later with "The Consequences of Love". Within the 100 passing minutes this piece of art lasts, times existence disappears and ones eyes is magnetically drawn towards Paolo Sorrentino`s minimalistic vision of an esoteric character`s monotone and ritualistic life at a hotel where alienated, lonely and discreet individuals live in a spiral of repetitive behavior. Through the main character`s point-of-view and reflecting voice-over, Paolo Sorrentino depicts a study of character about a nostalgic and introvert 49-year-old man, who against his own principles lets the light into his life at the moment he establishes communication with a female bartender who has spent two years trying to declare her existence to him. The duo is realized with downplayed and convincing acting from Toni Servillo and Olivia Magnani.

The observation of this fascinating game of perspectives which almost exclusively takes place at a hotel, becomes a unique film experience much due to Paolo Sorrentino`s characteristic use of close-ups, repeating scenes, slow-motion filming, long takes and several sequences with rapid editing where the music is impressively well calculated. Interacting with photographic expertise, quiet though intensifying progress, non-linear narrative, an aesthetic depiction of an almost mechanical upper class milieu and a synoptic screenplay, these cinematic components makes out "The Consequences of Love" to a brilliant exorcise of style and form. Existential drama, unconventional love fable, thriller, neo-noir, and 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. Image, sound, movement, figure of speech and narration is sublimely integrated in this supreme composition of style, which is created by sparkling interaction.