“Parthenope”: Paolo Sorrentino in Naples with the great beauty of Celeste Dalla Porta

In Greek mythology, Parthenope was one of the beautiful sirens who tried to seduce Ulysses, who fell in love with a centaur named Vesuvius and led the jealous Zeus to transform him into the volcano of the same name. Parthenope lived in the waters of the Gulf of Naples, and gave her name to this city, later renamed Neapolis. In Greek, Parthenope means “who has the face of a girl”, and Paolo Sorrentino could not have been more right when he chose the unknown Celeste Dalla Porta to play the eponymous heroine of his film Parthenope . Dalla Porta is stunningly beautiful and extremely sensual, while at the same time having the innocent face of a girl. And when we first see her, she is in the sea, like the mythological Parthenope.

[Watch the “Parthenope” trailer:]

As in his previous film, the autobiographical The Hand of God (2021), about his childhood and youth, and his passion for the city's club when Maradona played there, the Neapolitan Sorrentino sets Parthenope in the city where he was born. But unlike The Hand of God , which was a clear story told in a straight line, where the director was present through the main protagonist, Parthenope is an elliptical, allusive and symbolic film, at times even disconcerting and almost coded, and in some aspects close to the emotional, visual and figurative atmospheres of the director's masterpiece, The Great Beauty (2013).

Paolo Sorrentino is one of those rare filmmakers who, when he wants and needs to, can make the protagonists of his films simultaneously characters, symbols and embodiments of ideas and concepts (see Toni Servillo's Jep Gambardella in the aforementioned The Great Beauty) . And if in The Hand of God the young Fabietto is merely the director through a fictional interposed character, in Parthenope the dazzling and intelligent heroine is a character in her own right, and also a symbol, an emanation of Naples, a sublimated idea of ​​woman and a vehicle that Sorrentino uses to meditate on youth, the passage of time and on power, the unreality of the body and the impermanence of beauty.

[See an interview with Paolo Sorrentino:]

As the ever-drunk John Cheever (Gary Oldman) tells her at one point, her beauty is so great that it can “open doors and cause wars”. But Parthenope doesn’t use it for either of these purposes. She even tries to avoid those who show themselves to be fascinated by her, and refuses their favors. Paolo Sorrentino doesn’t film Celeste Della Porta with complicit lust, but in an admiring and contemplative way, with a hint of interrogation. And aware of the mysteries that this beauty holds and of which not even Parthenope herself has a complete notion or understanding, or of what to do with the gift that nature has given her (see her desire to be an actress, and the needle she decides to make for academic life, with the understanding of the only man who neither covets nor judges her and recognizes her intellectual value, the old professor of Anthropology played by Silvio Orlando).

[See an interview with Celeste Dalla Porta:]

It is the same mixture of admiration, contemplation and questioning, in fact, with which Sorrentino films Naples, which Parthenope appears in at a certain point in the story, and through whose streets and alleys, churches and palaces she guides us, while she matures and tries to find her way in life. He also shows us the city's relationship with faith (the allegorical episodes of the liquefaction of the blood of Saint Januarius, or the lewd bishop and the saint's treasure) and with the Mafia (the Fellinesque sequence of the union of the two crime families through the young couple forced to expose and consummate their intimacy in front of the members of both).

[Watch a sequence from the film:]

Summarizing Parthenope is as difficult as it is ungrateful and pointless, because it is as inscrutable as the beauty of its heroine, as splendidly impressionistic as Daria D'Antonio's photography, emphasized by the straightedge and square direction of Paolo Sorrentino, who films Naples in a permanent summer and always bathed in sunshine. And which cannot resist the football reference even at the end , when the now elderly and recently retired Parthenope (Stefania Sandre) returns (single) to the city that decades before she chose to leave to pursue university life instead of a career based on her beauty. A beauty that not even now, already advanced in years, has completely abandoned her.

Parthenope is a film that will displease many people, especially Paolo Sorrentino's detractors, who are not few. And it may even leave some of the director's admirers perplexed, especially those who are irritated by his Fellini-esque tics or disapprove when he strays into the grotesque (see the sequence of the professor's “problematic” son, who manages to touch both things at the same time). If only for Celeste Della Porta's revelation, Parthenope would be worth watching. But the film has much more to offer to those who are willing to follow in Parthenope's footsteps in the city and in life.