The Consequences of Love

Titta Di Girolamo has spent eight years living in an upscale hotel in Lugano, moving through its corridors with ritualized calm. He dresses in a crisp suit every day and avoids conversation or eye contact with other guests. His life is quiet, controlled, and dominated by routines rather than relationships.

Every morning he solves chess puzzles from the newspaper, sharpening his focus and giving his day a small, safe challenge. In the evenings he plays a tedious game of Grabber against a bankrupt aristocratic couple. These rituals sustain his insulated life and keep his emotions at bay.

Eight years earlier he worked as a broker who managed massive sums of money for powerful interests. In a single disastrous moment he lost hundreds of billions of lire on behalf of Cosa Nostra. As punishment, he becomes a mafia pawn, delivering weekly suitcases of money to a Swiss bank, while concealing a heroin habit that he administers every Wednesday at ten in the morning.

Titta’s gregarious younger stepbrother arrives, injecting a hint of unpredictability into his carefully ordered life. He pushes Titta to engage more with Sofia, the hotel waitress. The visit hints at the possibility of emotional disruption if Titta answers the call of connection.

Two Mafia men enter Titta's hotel room and turn the space into a temporary base for an assassination operation. They notice the very suitcase that carries the week's money, heightening the threat. Tension tightens as violence seems imminent around his controlled routine.

Titta and Sofia begin a restrained romance, sharing moments that break through his emotional wall. They go shopping together, and he buys Sofia a pair of shoes as a gesture of affection. That warmth marks a rare moment of humanity in his colorless world.

During a routine bank visit, tellers counting by hand discover that $100,000 is missing. Titta maintains his composure, insinuating it is a banking error and asking to close his account. To avoid provoking the Mafia, the bank staff bluff that nothing is wrong, allowing the missing funds to go unreported.

Backed by the missing money, Titta buys Sofia a luxurious car, a gesture she initially recoils from. She later returns to his hotel room to learn more about him and is moved enough to propose celebrating his upcoming fifty-fifth birthday. He accepts with quiet hope, seeing in the invitation a chance for genuine connection.

The Mafia assassins return, seize the week's suitcase, and force Titta to call Pippo to move the money to Southern Italy. Titta delays, claiming a prior appointment, revealing how precarious his life remains. The situation escalates into a dangerous game of power, bluff, and loyalty.

Sofia fails to show up for the birthday celebration, deepening Titta's sense of abandonment. He drives to the airport early, convinced that no one could truly love him. An ambulance passes on the way out of town, and Sofia has been in a car crash, unseen by him.

In a tense confrontation, Titta explains that he recovered the money earlier, a memory shown in flashback as the attackers try to escape. He confronts the boss, insisting he will not return what was stolen because they stole his life. The boss orders a transfer of the funds, but Titta refuses to reveal the money's location.

The next morning he is taken to a building site, suspended from a crane above a container of fresh concrete. If he does not disclose the money's whereabouts, he will be drowned. He has already given the money to the elderly aristocrats in the hotel, and he remains steadfast in his refusal, ending with a memory of his best friend Dino and an ambiguous fate.