The Consequences of Love (2004)

Paolo Sorrentino's The Consequences of Love arrives from 2004, a psychological thriller about a man in a suit who lives in a Swiss hotel and delivers suitcases of money for the Cosa Nostra. It is a film of cold corridors and colder accounting. Titta Di Girolamo, played by Toni Servillo with the expression of a man who has just been told the restaurant is closed, spends eight years in a modest room doing nothing at all, and the camera watches him do it with tremendous style.

For those of us who catalogue the cultural temperature of a picture, the film offers a clean slate. The cast is Italian because the film is Italian, and nobody pauses to explain that fact. Sofia, the barmaid, exists as a romantic and emotional catalyst, and the film has no interest in interrogating the arrangements of the hotel bar. Titta's heroin habit is rendered as private ruin, not as a condition to be diagnosed or destigmatized. Race, climate, body image, the redistribution of wealth: none of it appears. The mafia, it turns out, is a criminal enterprise here, not a metaphor for late capitalism. Money is lost and people are punished, and the film draws no lesson about markets.

What remains is atmosphere. Sorrentino shoots Lugano as a purgatory of polished surfaces, and the soundtrack (Mogwai, Boards of Canada) hums beneath the silence. When Titta finally speaks, he speaks to one woman, and then he is lowered into concrete while thinking of an electrician in the Alps. It is elegant, mournful, and entirely unconcerned with instructing us. A rarer vintage than the current market supplies.