PARTHENOPE. Sorrentino’s Failed Trick [REVIEW]

Naples is magnificent, women are magical, and youth and beauty are fleeting. These are the three great truths of Paolo Sorrentino—truths to which he has dedicated his filmmaking career. Like many great artists, through trial and error, the Italian director has found his own style (as well as his own creative obsessions and fetishes). Everything suggests that his period of experimentation has come to an end: from a talented epigone of Fellini, he has emerged as a master of cinema. Now, it is time for him to mix his favorite motifs, to examine the same themes from different perspectives. So, it will probably come as no surprise when I say that the Neapolitan’s latest film – Parthenope, presented at last year’s Cannes Film Festival—is classic Sorrentino, both formally and narratively. With one significant twist: for the first time in his work, we are dealing with a female protagonist and—at least seemingly—a female perspective.

In the waters surrounding the coast of Naples, Partenope is born (played by Celeste Dalla Porta in her big-screen debut). The name given to the girl seems far from accidental. According to Greek mythology, Parthenope was a siren who threw herself into the sea upon realizing that Odysseus, sailing nearby, was immune to her charms (for those unfamiliar, mythological sirens had wings instead of fins and could not swim). The sea washed her lifeless body ashore in Naples, forever intertwining her fate with the emerging city. The problem faced by Sorrentino’s protagonist is quite the opposite—no one can resist her charms. One man after another drools over Partenope, including her own brothers, hopelessly in love with their beautiful sister. Just when it seems that Sorrentino is about to offer us a peculiar, incestuous version of Jules and Jim, the film’s narrative takes a dramatic turn, evolving into a series of episodes from the protagonist’s life—from youth to well-earned retirement.

Most of these episodes revolve around the men she meets along the way—each teaching her something new about life. John Cheever, a bitter American writer played with grandiosity by Gary Oldman, treats the girl to monologues about the tragic consequences of repressed love and the irretrievable loss of youth. A gray-haired anthropology professor (Silvio Orlando) inadvertently encourages her to pursue an academic career, awakening in her a hunger for knowledge and a fascination with unanswerable questions. A bishop running for pope (Peppe Lanzetta) introduces her to the world of erotic fantasies, while Roberto (Marlon Joubert), whom she meets at a party, takes her to the poor districts of Naples, broadening the social perspective of a girl who spent her childhood in a seaside villa, living in utter comfort. Partenope thus turns out to be, above all, a film about the formation of identity and the consciousness of a modern woman—a process that, in her case, unfolds under the auspices of hungry male gazes (which organize the film’s narrative, though only problematized by the director to a certain extent).

On paper, this all sounds quite promising—but Sorrentino completely loses control over the structure of his film. Some episodes seem to drag on endlessly, while others are cut short after just a few minutes, sometimes at surprisingly random moments. Parthenope lacks rhythm, lacks the fluidity that made films like The Great Beauty so captivating. Sorrentino’s narratives once swept us away like the turbulent waters of the Tiber. We had no choice: his seductive tracking shots kept us glued to the screen, redefining the magic of cinema. Jep Gambardella’s Roman odyssey, though over 140 minutes long, felt like a short film—whereas the same cannot be said about Partenope’s journey.

Although I find it relatively easy to complain about Sorrentino’s recent projects (Loro suffered from very similar structural issues), in the end, credit must be given where it is due—the Italian director remains a master of audiovisual spectacle. Partenope contains a handful of breathtaking sequences: a few contemplative, slow close-ups of the blue waters around Capri, as well as scenes of intoxicating, all-night revelries, sometimes set to energetic pop music, other times to dignified classical compositions. As is often the case with Sorrentino, the sacred and the profane intertwine on every possible level, coexisting within an immersive, eclectic spectacle. The problem is that the film also consists of another kind of scene. The gaps between fleeting moments of beauty are filled with pretentious dialogues about the passage of time and other golden reflections that the Italian director has already served us in his previous works—though in a slightly more refined and certainly less irritating manner.

Let’s face it: Sorrentino has never been an intellectual filmmaker. He is a magnificent cinematic conjurer—more a disciple of Fellini than Pasolini—capable of selling us the most banal ideas in a way that makes us thank him for it. In one of the most famous scenes from The Great Beauty, a magician reveals to Jep that his signature trick—making a giraffe disappear—is just that: a trick. Nothing more, just an illusion. It’s hard to find a better definition of cinema in Sorrentino’s vision. In Parthenope, however, the trick—the one Sorrentino seemed to have perfected—has, for the first time, failed him. The giraffe did not disappear.