Paolo Sorrentino
Le Conseguenze Dell'Amore

If 21 years after its release you haven't seen this movie yet, don't read the review and enjoy it!

It's complicated to speak of love in this world that leans bulimically towards "just sex," trampled on and classified by age and even overlapping and expandable categories.

Years and years of not-so-innocuous bovarism might serve me... but I'm not sure.

A winner of many awards, studied in universities and one of my absolute favorite films. Written and directed by an incredibly original Sorrentino in directing, script, cinematography, soundtrack, and with dialogues as cold and sharp as marble. There is no way to review this little Italian masterpiece without delving into the layers and folds of this solidifying magma and the heat turning to cold at the end.

Titta di Girolamo like Cheyenne in the later "This must be the place" is pure but without salvation. Due to small jokes by fate, he finds himself an alien in a no-exit limbo. Only death can choose to anticipate or delay at will.

The protagonist lives in a hotel in Lugano and is a businessman... respectable, elegant, and very polite. He certainly arouses the curiosity of passersby or workers as a regular client. For every question, he has an answer, and his demeanor allows no one to "enter" his sealed life. It's with US that Titta urgently wants to speak of his purgatory and tells his story.

How can one survive solitude? By creating patterns and rituals: always the same place, always at the usual time or on a specific day. Even phone calls home have no layering, they're monotonous and useless. The brother's visit (the new nothing advancing) doesn't touch him. Nothing seems to move him from his "state" except the feeling of feelings which in his ominous situation is his ONLY fear.

At the first meaningful glance with the beloved waitress, a horse-drawn hearse passes behind them... a bad omen.

Life teaches us that we can stop talking about love or claim not to want to feel it anymore, but HE is there, lurking, and could come at any moment, and we'll never be ready.

When Titta decides to let go, he breaks all the patterns being aware it will be his end, but at least that moment of transition between purgatory and paradise will be worth a lifetime.

In reality, Sofia is a young, modern, beautiful woman but without depth, also a catalyst of changing times. She approaches Titta like everyone else, out of curiosity. Indeed, sometimes the object of love is a mere appendix, an extension of our expanding passion, nothing more.

Returning to my bovarism, when my favorite young nurse is on duty and hands me the cup of water for the painkiller, our hands and eyes brush, and for a split second I feel a small electric jolt down my spine... I make do with it.