Every work of art begins with a question. With Parthenope, Paolo Sorrentino asks: What if a woman was hot?
In Neapolitan lore, Parthenope — derived from the Greek “Parthenos” meaning “virgin” — is a mermaid or siren whose passions resulted in the founding of Naples. In this film, Parthenope is another legendary beauty (played by Celeste Dalla Porta), born in a water birth, in the Bay of Naples. She is the city itself, and the film moves through the decades of her life in a series of mythic vignettes which illustrate ideas about the ache of beauty and the fleetingness of youth; of the insatiable yearning of desire, for sex or understanding; and of the contradictions and crumbling grandeur of the city, personified in an early insert shot of a classical marble bust missing the lower half of its face.
Parthenope enjoys her bittersweet days of prematurely nostalgic youth on an island vacation with her childhood playmate, the besotted son of the family maid, and her moody older brother, with whom she revels in a caressing and quasi-incestuous relationship until his suicide carves out in her a void that persists throughout the rest of her wanderings. Studying at the university — L’Università degli Studi di Napoli — she starts down the academic track, under the mentorship of a crusty professor who sees the spark of genius in her sadness and dissatisfaction, with plentiful digressions: during a brief acting career, she meets a bitter and bewigged Sophia Loren manque named Greta Cool (she “adores anal sex,” it is rumored); she witnesses the union of two Camorra families’ son and daughter, consummated in a basement in front of dozens of eager witnesses; she tarries a while with the vain and worldly priest who carries out the Miracle of San Gennaro, draping her nude body in the church’s cache of jewels. The action continues up to at least one documentary shot of the public celebrations for SSC Napoli’s 2023 scudetto, which Sorrentino posits as a beloved but dismal city’s return to a vanished glory.
It’s like pulling teeth to derive either a story or a thesis from all these chapters, which are alternately airy and abstract or ostentatious and obscure. The film could best be likened to one of Fellini’s episodic late-period burlesques, but played at half speed — it’s outrageously pretentious, but too dozy and sun-drunk to even read as campy. Gary Oldman shows up in expat linen suits as John Cheever, who gives Parthenope some drunken-sage advice (“Desire is a mystery, and sex its funeral”) but, in line with the film’s soporific rhythms, I swear you can catch him nodding off during one of the interminable pauses between his line readings.
Parthenope is an honors graduate in anthropology with an insatiable curiosity about the world, but more observed than observer: as played by Dalla Porta, she moves regally and alluringly, as if aware that every set of eyes in the room is constantly on her. She remains passive, sphinxlike and inscrutable — men asking her what she’s thinking is a refrain throughout the film. Dressed in slinky disco dresses with plunging necklines, she’s often seen staring out at the sea or back at the camera, leaning back from it teasingly with a bemused or beatific expression on her face; she wanders through tableaux of beautifully dressed extras while the film’s incredibly languorous tone-poem coloratura horn section washes over you, or while characters speak past each other in weighty but nonsensical aphorisms. What Sorrentino is after isn’t acting, it’s posing; it’s not dialogue, it’s slogans; it’s not a narrative, it’s a vibe — it’s not a scene, it’s an editorial shoot for a luxury brand.
Though this is his seventh film at Cannes, and Il Divo won the Jury Prize here in 2008, the film festival with which Sorrentino is most strongly associated is Toronto, where his Bulgari ad starring Anne Hathaway, Zendaya and a peacock plays before every public screening to ironic applause. Though the much longer film, Parthenope hardly extracts more substance out of its recurrent scenes in which a hypnotized camera trails a beautiful woman in glamorous clothes as she walks dreamily through a villa, trailing an arm behind or giving a sultry, wistful look over her shoulder. “In the search for wonder, there are no endings, only new beginnings” is a line from the Bulgari ad; “love as a means of survival has been a failure… or maybe not” is a line from Parthenope. It could just easily be the other way around.
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