Today, we return to European cinema, to one of the few great directors working, Paolo Sorrentino, & one of his early movies, The Consequences of Love (2004). This is not a romance—rather it’s a romanzo, that is, a novel. It stars Sorrentino’s favorite actor, Toni Servillo, who has been the most important Italian actor for a decade, if not two, & a young lady who reminds us somehow of the beautiful Italian actresses of the mid-century, Olivia Magnani, the granddaughter of Anna Magnani, one of the great actresses of Rossellini, Visconti, &c.
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Now, as to the remark about being like a novel—Sorrentino is a novelist in his spare time, he was a screenwriter before he became a director & still writes his own stories. The role he wrote for Toni Servillo in this case requires quite a bit of soliloquizing—the writing is writerly. The character spends the first half of the movie narrating his life; it is only in the second half that we see him live his life, so to speak. The effect is very much like the late- or post-Romantic novel, it shows a growing awareness that we do not understand ourselves & might not be able to give account, or take account of the motives of our actions…
Sebastian & I are doing a series of conversations on Sorrentino’s movies. We talked about his most famous—Oscar-winning—movie, La Grande Bellezza: A romance, the coming into old age & return to art of a writer who was once young & in love, but lost his way, becoming “the king of the trendy.” A beautiful movie which also includes a lot of crazy things about the life of the new Roman elite, lefty, modernist, exhausted… It’s also an introduction to beautiful Roman architecture, starting with the Acqua Paola & the Tempietto del Bramante…
We have also talked about Sorrentino’s most recent movie, The Hand Of God, available on Netflix, which also produced it. This is a very autobiographical movie, as beautiful as his other romances, but rather a better fit for the character of its protagonist, who’s not quite 18. There is much to observe, but it is hard to find what to say or to summon the courage to do something at that age… Those who know Naples, where it is set, will find a loving & often charming recreation of the city in the ‘80s.
Next, Sebastian & I will be talking about Sorrentino’s one very political film, a biography of a kind, Il Divo, about Giulio Andreotti, the incredibly successful, stone-faced, long-time leader of the Christian Democrats, the party that mostly ran Italy from the plebiscitary abolition of the monarchy after WWII to 1994, when corruption scandals brought down the entire party system.
Finally did see La Grande Belleza--it's everything your interlocutor says, even if it might not be worth viewing 100 times!