Consequences of love

From its ten nominations for the 2005 Italian film industry's Davids, The Consequences of Love (2004), won five top awards: film, director and screenplay (a trio for Paolo Sorrentino), cinematography (Luca Bigazzi) and actor (Toni Servillo). Its editing, sound, music and lead supporting actor were worthy nominees too, and for its first 45 minutes this movie was heading straight into the top rating level.

A middle-aged heavy-smoking Italian businessman has rented a Swiss hotel room for eight years. He sits in the hotel lounge, writes notes to himself, utters off-screen thoughts, eavesdrops on his impoverished neighbours, plays cards with them, is a creature of habits : weekly heroin, periodic blood transfusions, frequent money laundering trips, constant dispassionate stares at the world around him. It includes the hotel barmaid, who seems to be fascinated by him, and his estranged wife and three adult children, who hate to even talk to him on the telephone.

The writer-director's plot and character developments are finely paced, slowly but with exquisite, beguiling framing and depth of colour. He seems to exist only to receive suitcases of US dollars from an unknown woman, and drive them in a private car to a private bank. The overall concept and treatment appears to be a stylish precursor of The American, in which George Clooney played a similar foreign man of mystery.

Then, with increasing lack of credibility, Sorrentino injects a rash of overblown subplots. Wild threads, some leading to tangled loose ends, others tied up risibly with illogical acts by the anti-hero and his Mafia bosses and their brutal underlings.

Actor-director Servillo also starred in Il Divo, winning another Best Actor David on 2009 (having won it the previous year as well for The Girl By the Lake). He was a star turn too in Gomorrah: his facial tics and tiny smiles could launch a thousand screenplays.

With restraints on his writing imagination, Sorrentino could win greater glory as an exceptional movie director. Sorrentino's subsequent films include L'Amico di famiglia (2006) and Il Divo (2008), both highly-rated and worth seeing saspo.