Paolo Sorrentino
Le Conseguenze Dell'Amore

The second feature film by Neapolitan director Paolo Sorrentino, after "L'uomo in più" from 2001, is a chilling portrait of a lifeless man trapped in a cold world, where at some point, a match is struck.

Toni Servillo masterfully plays Titta di Girolamo ("I am not a frivolous man, the only frivolous thing I own is my name"), a mysterious figure who has been living confined to a hotel in a gray Lugano for eight years. With a serious, impassive mask, incapable of a smile and devoid of emotion, Di Girolamo leads a monotonous existence marked by his cigarettes, the dose of heroin he regularly injects every Wednesday at precisely 10 AM, evening card games with an elderly couple fallen into poverty due to gambling, and the silent sessions in the hotel lobby where Sofia (Olivia Magnani), the beautiful waitress trying to get his attention for some time, also works. He even has a wife from whom he has been separated for years, and his family struggles to talk to him, a cause and perhaps also an effect of the impenetrability that characterizes him.

Titta Di Girolamo's world is empty, without light, without words, and Sorrentino's first merit is to show this world not through the eyes of those trying to enter it, intrigued (like the viewer) by the mystery surrounding this opaque figure, but instead, to let the protagonist himself describe it through his thoughts, considerations, and monologues that bounce between the smooth walls of his mind. The first half of the film flows like this, drawing a picture of Titta Di Girolamo and gradually adding pieces to what will be the final puzzle: suitcases full of money begin to appear which are regularly brought to the bank, it is discovered that Di Girolamo keeps a gun in his room, and he receives strange visits from time to time. The explanation of everything will ultimately be more banal than what the viewer probably imagined, but this does not matter; what matters is the desire for redemption and escape from the drabness that at some point, the protagonist sees kindling inside himself: the consequences of love, of a love really never born, will lead Di Girolamo to physical self-destruction but also to spiritual salvation. The choice to respond to Sofia's attentions will be the small push to the first domino piece that will gradually lead Di Girolamo to a small, personal redemption.

Sorrentino's cinema consists of disenchanted men, of bare and sterile atmospheres in which these characters live their troubles whose cause is always to be sought within themselves and their own actions, from the double Antonio Pisapia to Titta Di Girolamo to Geremia "Cuore D'Oro" de' Geremei and up to the notorious Giulio Andreotti, all victims of their own choices that render them solitary and all slaves to their own obsessions, making them incredibly human, since everyone has small and apparently sick occurrences; it is a cinema of the defeated. Titta Di Girolamo never had courage towards anything, towards himself, towards the truth, towards his own condition, but the cell of isolation he has been (and also, he has) locked in will remain sealed until he himself decides, one day, to open it to meet his end. There is no love in Titta Di Girolamo's soul, he is incapable of it, given the conscious absence of the same that he has always been a victim of, there are only the consequences that lead him to annihilation, voluntary and redemptive.

"If only I had a bit of strength left to give you, if only I had a bit of heart to share with myself, if only I had a bit of love, it would be for you" ("Vals För Satan", Kent)