Like - Watching A Movie Without Expectations
The freest way to watch a movie is to go in without having anything more than a vague idea of what it’s about.1 I did this last night with Paolo Sorrentino’s The Consequences of Love, which I can best describe as a Italian romantic crime film that is spiritually anti-Michael Mann (insofar as there’s more to a man than his job). It’s an extremely stylish film with slick cinematography by Luca Bigazzi. The images are carefully composed with real attentiveness towards the subject and scene. This is all very intentional, as The Consequences of Love is the story of a very observant, shy, and reclusive man named Titta Di Girolamo. He’s a middle-aged loner who has lived by himself in the same luxury Swiss hotel room for the past eight years. He’s a man with unmentionable secrets whose past comes rushing into the present when his highly regimented life is broken up by a series of unexpected visits and a budding romance with a much younger woman who works at the hotel. I won’t give anymore of the plot away because it earns its twists and turns. The Consequences of Love is a mature film. It unfolds naturally through a highly intentional story structure that begins as cold and distanced but becomes emotional and vulnerable—which ends up being Titta’s undoing. He knows this, of course, but was he right to succumb or should he have heeded his own advice to “not underestimate the consequences of love”?
By a vague idea I mean to know who directed the movie and what genre it falls under that way you don’t end up watching something you’d really rather not see.