Reviewed on May 22nd at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival – In Competition Section. 137 Mins
Cast: Celeste Dalla Porta, Stefania Sandrelli, Gary Oldman, Silvio Orlando
Genre: Drama, Fantasy
Director: Paolo Sorrentino
In Irish Cinemas: Now
The myth of Parthenope exists in many forms, each casting its heroine in a different but equally haunting light. In one version, she is a siren, undone by unrequited love: having failed to enchant Ulysses with her song, she casts herself into the sea in despair. Her lifeless body, retrieved by fishermen, is said to have washed ashore where it was reverently buried—over time, that burial site would blossom into the city of Naples. In another story, Parthenope is no mythical creature but a mortal woman deeply in love with the centaur Vesuvius. Jealous of their bond, Zeus intervenes, turning Parthenope into the city itself and Vesuvius into the volcano that looms above it, his every eruption a fiery outpouring of longing and rage. Across all versions, Parthenope becomes more than myth: she is a symbol of Naples—exquisitely beautiful, impossibly tragic, and forever caught between vitality and ruin.
Paolo Sorrentino’s latest film, Parthenope, revisits his native Naples not with the sparse realism of The Hand of God (2021) but with a lush, operatic sensibility reminiscent of The Great Beauty (2013). In The Hand of God, Naples was refracted through the lens of adolescence and loss, embodied by a teenage boy and a football legend—an intimate elegy. But Parthenope is something else entirely: a full-bodied ode, soaked in light, longing, and lavish imagery. It feels as though Sorrentino is making amends for the restraint of his earlier film, unleashing here all the visual excess, sensuality, and surrealism that Naples seems to demand.
At the heart of the film is Parthenope herself, portrayed through most of the narrative by the ethereal Celeste Dalla Porta. Her introduction is almost mythic: she is born from the sea not once but twice. First, as an infant, her arrival was marked by a baroque, rococo cradle gifted by her godfather. Then again, at eighteen, she emerges from the waters of the Mediterranean, a modern-day Venus reborn. Her beauty becomes a subject of both awe and sorrow—characters describe it as “unforgettable but joyless,” “a disruptive force.” Men orbit her like moths around a flame, and even a helicopter circling her above the island of Capri feels like a mechanical suitor overcome with reverence. Some of these men are undone by their desire, consumed by the same sea that gave her life.
The film unfolds as a loosely structured picaresque, tracing Parthenope’s meandering journey through her twenties and early thirties—a drifting passage between hedonism and scholarship, sensuality and solitude. She stands at the crossroads of identity, torn between becoming an actress and an academic. Along the way, she encounters a James Dean doppelgänger who leads her through a luminous, aquatic brothel to a dive bar where young lovers must consummate their passion before an audience, an act brazenly titled “La Grande Fusion.” A lecherous priest, grotesque and ceremonial, drapes her in vestments only to violate her in a sacred cloister—his character a dark echo of Roberto Herlitzka’s papal aspirant in The Great Beauty.
Yet there are moments of tenderness, too: Parthenope forms a chaste and curious bond with the American writer John Cheever, portrayed with quiet charm by Gary Oldman, and she cultivates a cerebral, almost filial relationship with her thesis advisor, who oversees her study on the anthropology of miracles. These interludes lend the film a thoughtful intimacy, grounding its more extravagant flights of fantasy.
The film’s detour into 1970s academia inevitably evokes comparisons to Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend—particularly its TV adaptation by Saverio Costanzo. But Sorrentino’s Naples is a different creature altogether: “shabby and whimsical,” as one character puts it, more dreamscape than document. There is no conventional plot, tidy narrative arc, or symbolic payoff. Both Parthenope the woman and Parthenope the film drift from one episode to the next, accumulating meaning only through atmosphere, image, and sensation. Where The Great Beauty revelled in the grotesque sublime, Youth in melancholy grandeur, and The Hand of God in personal grief, Parthenope floats somewhere in between—a reverie without resolution.
Critics may call it self-indulgent, a style without substance. And yet, the images—those uncanny, hypnotic images—possess a haunting power. Set against Lele Marchitelli’s plaintive piano or the gravel-throated nostalgia of Italian pop, Daria D’Antonio’s cinematography astonishes. Her camera glides and pauses, transfixed, before a crab-like vehicle spraying disinfectant along a cholera-stricken promenade. It lingers on the face of a faded actress masked in shame after botched plastic surgery, weeping amid a sea of dolls. In a surreal climax, a door opens onto a long-concealed child, whose sudden appearance feels like a miracle, a punchline, or both.
Parthenope is grotesque, magical, mournful, and defiant—a fantasia of innocence and corruption, of bottomless poverty and baroque excess. It is a film that captures Naples’s contradictions not by resolving them but by embracing their absurd, ecstatic coexistence. In doing so, Sorrentino offers us not just a portrait of a mythic woman but a love letter to a city that is itself myth made flesh: his “dear, awful Naples.”
Overall: 6.5/10
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