Le conseguenze dell'amore (Paolo Sorrentino, 2004)

A solitary man has lived for eight years in a Swiss hotel and regularly goes out on the same assignment over and over again, depositing a suitcase of notes in a bank. He spurns all human contact bar a nightly card game with an elderly aristocratic couple fallen on hard times, who he also eavesdrops on through the wall of his room. It gradually becomes clear that his estranged family rejects him and that he is effectively a prisoner of the Mafia, forced to do their bidding indefinitely. It's only when he finally dares to let his guard down with the hotel barmaid that the interminable pattern of his life, frozen in aspic, finally changes.
Toni Servillo, in one of his many collaborations with the director, most notably 2013's The Great Beauty, does an admirable job of communicating the inner turmoil behind the poker face of a self-possessed and misanthropically cynical man whose life has been taken from him. The strong suits of Sorrentino's films always include the camerawork and eclectic soundtrack, and The Consequences of Love is no exception to this, competing with anything Nicolas Winding Refn might produce in laconic stylishness, but there is a purpose under the gloss. His gilded cage and imposed, unvarying routine create a prison from which there is only one escape, and it's at the realisation of that fact as a universal human predicament that an emotive connection with the shielded character is finally formed.

7/10