PARTHENOPE (2024)
Starring Celeste Dalla Porta, Stefania Sandrelli, Gary Oldman, Silvio Orlando, Luisa Ranieri, Peppe Lanzetta, Isabella Ferrari, Lorenzo Gleijeses, Daniele Rienzo, Dario Aita, Marlon Joubert, Alfonso Santagata, Biagio Izzo, Paola Calliari, Nello Mascia, Silvia Degrandi and Cristiano Scotto di Galletta.
Screenplay by Paolo Sorrentino.
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino.
Distributed by A24. 137 minutes. Rated R.
Back in the 1990s I was in a little art shop in the SoHo section of New York, and I fell in love with a poster they had there. It was an enlargement of an old photograph called “American Girl in Italy” by Ruth Orkin, and the picture was of a pretty woman walking deteminedly in front of a pizza parlor, not realizing (or perhaps she did) that there were a whole bunch of Italian men loitering down the block, quite obviously ogling her.
I bought the poster, proud of my cool New York art purchase. Not long after that, though, it turned out to be a fairly common poster, and for a few years you could not go into a mall poster shop without running across it. To this day, I’ll occasionally see it as a decoration in random pizza parlors. Yet, I still have a fondness for the poster and still have it up on the stairway wall leading up to my bedroom.
I mention this poster because at least for the first 30-45 minutes, Parthenope reminded me of that poster blown up to feature length, and I kind of dug that. Oh sure, the title character is not American, but the early stages of the film is mostly showing the stunningly pretty Parthenope (Celeste Dalla Porta) walking through her gorgeous Naples beach area like “The Girl from Ipanema.” She may or may not recognize that every man she passed (and many of the women, too) was totally smitten with her. (She mostly seems to.) To paraphrase that jazz standard, “tall and tan and young and lovely, Parthenope goes walking, and when she passes, each one she passes goes ‘ahhhh…’”
Then about 45 minutes in, the film starts going off on some really weird and dark tangents, which makes Parthenope a less fun and definitely more morose experience. It is still extremely well-made most of the time, although several plot threads are almost annoyingly odd.
It is also gorgeous. Parthenope is worth seeing for the scenery alone. (I’m speaking of the locations it is filmed in, but the actors are also often spectacular.)
Which is not completely a surprise. I have seen writer/director Paolo Sorrentino’s two English language films – This Must Be the Place (2013) and Youth (2015) – and both of those films also shared a tendency with Parthenope to mix some stunning filmmaking and beautiful places and people with sometimes annoying whimsy and odd plot devices. (This movie is mostly in Sorrentino’s native Italian, except for several scenes with Gary Oldman as novelist John Cheever, which are filmed in English.)
A whole lot of things happen in Parthenope, and yet at the same time not much happens at all, if you know what I mean. There are certain through lines in the story, but all too often Parthenope – the woman and the film – gets distracted by strange outside forces that often do not seem to be worthy of her time.
The film looks at the entirety of her life – from birth to old age – but it mostly focuses on the years from her late teens though her mid-30s. Parthenope is born into a mostly happy but highly dysfunctional family – her parents are mostly standoffish, and she seems a bit unnaturally attached to her brother.
Beyond her great beauty, Parthenope has a strong, questing intellect and is always ready with a pithy quip in any situation. However, for as smart and independent as she may be, she all too often falls back on her beauty and becomes the fantasy creature that others see in her.
Early on, she tells an older, rich man who is smitten with her that she will not sleep with him just “out of politeness,” and yet afterwards she seems to do just that with many people who cross her path. You never get the feeling that she feels much for the one man she refers to as her first love. Strangely it appears that her brother was her only true love in life, although they did not really act upon that.
There are two older men who do play positive roles in her life though. One was her anthropology professor, one of the few men who did not see her through a sexual prism. He becomes her mentor and a father figure, but he has a big secret that he fears sharing with her. The other man is famous novelist John Cheever, who was Parthenope’s favorite writer who she meets by chance, and they strike up a short-but-sweet friendship. It is obvious that she would be willing for more in the relationship, but the novelist realizes its is futile and that he does not want to waste a moment of her youth.
Ultimately, Parthenope as a film is trying to show that beauty does not bring happiness. In fact this theme is not just for its heroine, but is also extended to her hometown of Naples, which is strikingly pretty and yet has a dark, desperate, sad underbelly. (Several characters state how much they hate the town, although it looks like paradise.)
While it makes its point – somewhat – way too often the filmmakers seem to be spinning their wheels and sometimes the lead character comes off as a beautiful cipher. Parthenope would be better if it cut maybe a half hour from its runtime – preferably some of the more obtuse plot threads. Still, it is worth seeing.
Jay S. Jacobs
Copyright ©2025 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: February 6, 2025.
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