"Image, sound, movement, figure of speech and narration is sublimely integrated in this supreme composition of style, created by sparkling interaction.

The middle aged loner Titta De Girolamo has lived in a anonymous hotel in Switzerland during the last eight years. He is a well dressed and short-spoken man who spends his days at the hotels bar and lobby, where he distantly observer the personnel and the guests. Titta has maintained a ice-cold facade for a long time, but it starts cracking the day he unexpectedly lets himself become interested in the attractive bartender Sofia.

Italian director and screenwriter Paulo Sorrentino had made a number of short films before he in 2001 made his debut feature "One man up". He received international recognition tree years later with "The Consequences of Love".

Within the 100 passing minute this piece of art lasts, times existence disappears and ones eyes is magnetically drawn towards Sorrentinos minimalistic vision of an esoteric characters monotone and ritualistic life at a hotel where alienated, lonely and discreet individuals live in a spiral of repetitive behavior. Through the main characters point-of-view and reflecting voice-over, Sorrentino depicts a character study about a nostalgic and introvert 49 year old, who against his own principles lets the light into his life at the moment he establishes communication with a female bartender who has spent two years trying to declare her existence to him. The duo is realized with downplayed and convincing acting from Toni Servillo and Olivia Magnani.

The observation of this fascinating game of perspectives that almost exclusively takes place at a hotel, becomes a unique film experience much due to Sorrentino's characteristic use of close-ups, repeating scenes, slow-motion filming, long takes and several sequences with rapid editing where the music is impressively well calculated. Interacting with photographic expertise, quiet though intensifying progress, non-linear narrative, an aesthetic depiction of an almost mechanical upper class milieu and a synoptic screenplay, these cinematic components makes out "The Consequences of Love" to a brilliant exorcise of style and form. Existential drama, unconventional love fable, thriller, noir, and gangster drama. Sorrentino's genre mix is well-constructed, and this ingenious work is inspiring cinematic creativity from the innovating opening scene to the stylized ending."