‘Parthenope’ Review: A Spectacle Lost In Its Own Beauty

Paolo Sorrentino has fixated on beauty and youth in past films, but never so overtly as in Parthenope. The Italian filmmaker embodies the male gaze in sprawling tale, which follows a charismatic woman (Celeste Dalla Porta) from her birth in 1950 to present day. Our heroine, named Parthenope after the ancient Greek settlement that is now Naples or perhaps the siren of myth, drifts through her life, often searching and uncertain. She is, as one character remarks, beautiful but with “joyless” eyes. 

Parthenope is born by in the sea, the daughter of a wealthy family with an ostentatious coastal villa and little to do but sun themselves. She shows an early predilection for knowledge, reading American novels much to the amusement of her parents and moody brother Raimondo (Daniele Rienzo)—with whom she shares an attraction straight out of a Greek play. Everyone around her, in fact, is infatuated with her, a shared surface-level obsession that prompts elder family friends to propose marriage and her boyfriend Sandrino (Dario Aita) to tail her like a puppy dog. Parthenope wants more, though, and eventually decides to study anthropology at university. Her professor Devoto Marotta (Silvio Orlando) is the only man who seems to see below the surface, encouraging Parthenope’s studies while others conventionally suggest she become an actress. 

Her journey, however, is not straightforward. Parthenope detours after the inevitable death of her brother by suicide and decides to try her hand at becoming a movie star. She takes the world’s weirdest acting lessons from a masked actress, Flora Malva (Isabella Ferrari), and encounters the famous Greta Cool (Luisa Ranieri) on a cruise ship. She meets men, all of whom are immediately enchanted by her beauty, and accompanies them to parties around Naples, including an X-rated mating ritual that seems inserted (sorry) for the sake of spectacle. 

But that’s ultimately what Parthenope is: a spectacle. Sorrentino frames stunning scenes, almost like a series of editorial fashion shoots, but the story becomes lost in the aesthetics. The film was co-produced by Saint Laurent Productions (which also produced Emilia Pérez) and the fashion house’s creative director Anthony Vaccarello served as the costume artistic director—a collaboration that has yielded immaculate looks. Throughout the film, several characters wonder what Parthenope is thinking as she gazes into the distance or into the sky, looking wistful and ethereal. But Sorrentino doesn’t ever answer that question. Parthenope, embodied with some complexity by Dalla Porta, eludes both those around her and the audience. She manages to find a path for herself, as confirmed by the time jump at the end, but it’s never quite clear what she thinks. She’s seductive, certainly, but what exists beyond her designer dresses and flowing hair? 

Men are, of course, obsessed with women like Parthenope. She contains an effortless, unmatched beauty, but never stays too long. “She’s always fleeing,” one of her admirers observes. “That’s why men love her.” Women, too, are impressed by Parthenope’s appearance and lured in by her youthful looks. Only her professor and the author John Cheever (Gary Oldman), who she meets one summer by a pool, appear to care about her ideas. Sorrentino is a thoughtful filmmaker who thinks carefully about the way he presents his images. But what would this story be in the hands of a female director? The camera loves Dalla Porta and so does Sorrentino, evoking the same fixation as the people around Parthenope. And perhaps the film is only meant to be a nebulous, artful collection of scenes that never crack its lead character open. The last 30 minutes bring a truly bizarre moment, one that Sorrentino may be unable to fully explain, and that is ultimately the main flaw here. The viewer never knows why Parthenope is being told, beyond looking good. A film can exist for aesthetic value alone, but only if it doesn’t try to expand itself to unreached depths. In the end, Parthenope seems to assert is that beauty is unappreciated until it vanishes—a lesson we all learn too late—but like its lead character, the film remains too shallow to fully understand.