His films like 'Senso' and 'The Leopard' explore doomed love entangled with historical tragedy and social impossibility, creating inevitably tragic romance.

His visually poetic cinema constantly returns to lovers separated by circumstance, time, and fate, most hauntingly in 'In the Mood for Love' and '2046'.

His films present love as fundamentally destructive and impossible, particularly in works like 'Teorema' and 'Salò', where desire leads inexorably to ruin.