It’s no secret that Paolo Sorrentino is profoundly obsessive about the matters of youth and nice magnificence. Such preoccupations — and several other extra! — are self-evident in movies like “Youth” and “The Nice Magnificence,” two unbridled shows of Italian maximalism which can be each bit as refined as their titles counsel.
Following 2021’s achingly private “The Hand of God,” wherein the Neapolitan director filtered the agony and the ecstasy of his adolescence by the identical veil of Fellini-esque sacrilege that he’d beforehand forged over motion pictures about Silvio Berlusconi and the fading splendor of Roman historical past, Sorrentino is again on his proverbial bullshit with one other sprawling flesh parade that’s extra consumed with summary beliefs than it’s with the stuff of life itself. As soon as once more, he returns with a rapturously luxurious movie that blurs the road between the sacred and the profane till intercourse seems like faith and faith seems like intercourse, and as soon as once more he’s compelled by the siren’s music of youth and nice magnificence.
With “Parthenope,” which borrows its identify from one of many sirens of Greek fable, Sorrentino is unusually preoccupied with the connection between youth and nice magnificence. This isn’t the primary time that he’s pitted these twin intoxicants towards one another, contrasting the ephemeral nature of human lust towards the everlasting spirit of the poetry, structure, and deities we create in retaliation to that truth. In “Parthenope,” nonetheless, the 53-year-old filmmaker dares to ask whether or not it’s doable to separate the 2. Extra to the purpose: He questions whether or not individuals are able to totally appreciating them each on the identical time.
However actually, “Parthenope” is only a lengthy film made by a middle-aged man who nearly drives himself insane attempting to think about what life can be like as an unbelievably scorching lady. It’s a thriller that’s taunted male artists for so long as they’ve dreamed of possessing the great thing about their muses, Sorrentino’s efforts to make sense of it really feel as anachronistic in 2024 because it might need been to provide beginning to a sea creature from historical Greece through the summer season of 1950. Then once more, some compulsions could also be extra timeless than we understand.
Legend has it that Parthenope drowned herself within the sea when her songs didn’t seduce Odysseus, her physique ultimately washing up alongside the shores of Naples. In “Parthenope” (Paolo’s Model), the mythic magnificence is born to a rich household who personal a surprising villa on the water’s edge, and — in a lighter and extra effervescent twist on “Teorema” — are slowly pushed insane by the stainless creature who comes into their lives.
Performed by newcomer/prompt star Celeste Dalla Porta, whose putting however unforced magnificence might simply sing males into shipwrecks, Parthenope is each inch a male fantasy made flesh. That’s much less a criticism of Sorrentino’s movie than it’s a description of its premise, as the author/director rapidly admits to these phrases as he goes about attempting to resolve Parthenope’s attract, and finally — with a bitterness disguised because the stuff of chic revelation — debunk it. From the start, everyone needs to have Parthenope, however no one will have the ability to preserve her. “She’s all the time fleeing,” one of many film’s limitless catalog of suitors laments. “That’s why males love her.”
Parthenope’s impressionable curiosity is just matched by her eagerness to be taught. “I don’t know something, however I like every part,” she sighs, her face drooping right into a pout extra radiant than the typical mortal’s most ecstatic smile. Fortunate for Parthenope, Italy is stuffed with prepared lecturers. Academics like Sandrino (Dario Aita), the housekeeper’s son, who fawns over Parthenope for the primary 18 years of their lives, and reveals her that males will all the time need to know what she’s fascinated with as a result of her magnificence is just too impenetrable for them to guess. And her ill-fated older brother Raimondo (Daniele Rienzo), who teaches Parthenope that even blood kin aren’t proof against the longing she evokes; it’s a small mercy that Sorrentino relegates these incestual urges to the periphery of the motion, the place their poetic tragedy can encourage the plot from a secure distance.
After all, “plot” is a loaded phrase to make use of within the context of a Paolo Sorrentino movie, because the director usually appears to be much less of a storyteller than he’s the ringmaster of a shifting circus; as per Sorrentino custom, the decades-spanning “Parthenope” doesn’t adhere to easy cause-and-effect a lot because it swirls ahead by the years prefer it’s attempting to aerate some undiscovered that means from them. “Parthenope” is significantly much less dreamlike than a number of the director’s earlier work, however huge stretches of the film appear to exist in nebulous pockets of non-time, if solely due to their bizarre unreality.
That’s undoubtedly true of the lengthy sequence wherein Parthenope has a run-in with the American creator John Cheever (an “alcoholic, depressed, marvelous” Gary Oldman, solely a bit cleaned up from the set of “Sluggish Horses”). They cross paths at a resort in the midst of Parthenope’s first true summer season of self-becoming (proper after a person has been so overcome by her magnificence that he asks her out from a helicopter in mid-flight), and really feel bonded to one another as a result of the closeted novelist is just about the primary man Parthenope has ever met who doesn’t need to have intercourse along with her. It is a system so purely Sorrentino that you just nearly need him to get away with it only for being self-possessed sufficient to strive, however his Cheever can supply so many canned musings earlier than it begins to really feel such as you’re watching probably the most fantastically filmed audiobook ever made. “Need is a thriller, and intercourse its funeral.” “Magnificence is like warfare, it opens doorways.” “Artwork is the overcome chaos.” OK, that final quote isn’t on this film, nevertheless it speaks to why John Cheever is.
For sure, he takes up a variety of Parthenope’s time for somebody who insists that he doesn’t need to waste a minute of her youth. Their solely actually essential trade comes on the finish of Oldman’s glorified cameo, as Cheever asks Parthenope if she would marry him if he have been 40 years youthful. To which Parthenope, who prides herself on having a solution prepared for every part, replies that the true query is that if Cheever would marry her if she have been 40 years older.
It’s the primary of a number of moments within the movie that reminds Parthenope of her fleeting youth with a pointedness that threatens to frame on spite, as if Sorrentino is taking some gendered revenge in the concept that ladies solely briefly possess the ability to drive males insane. Preoccupied with the concept that a scarcity of self-knowledge is what makes folks mysterious, “Parthenope” denies its namesake any actual interiority, satisfied that depriving us the possibility to understand her perspective may someway improve her rhetorical worth. Right here, objectification is framed as a way to an finish, and whereas Celeste Dalla Parta is actually one of the vital photogenic human beings I’ve ever seen (“Parthenope” is replete with close-ups so excellent and straight-on they really feel like Classical Greek busts), the vary she shows in later parts of the movie counsel that Sorrentino has sorely underutilized her abilities as an actress.
That is all a prelude to Parthenope’s time as an anthropology pupil, the place she comes below the tutelage of a curmudgeonly previous professor named Devoto Marotta (an exquisite Silvio Orlando). He’s such a great trainer that he refuses to even inform her what anthropology actually is, a riddle that solely he can reply. Sorrentino will put a pin on this because the film’s skeleton key and circle again to it within the dying minutes with a gust of manufactured profundity, however his sensorial impulses refuse to let him stick with it for greater than a scene or two at a time.
As a substitute, he indulges himself on a walkabout by his personal bigger than life creativeness, a journey to nowhere that features unpredictable pit stops like a cholera outbreak, a “Nice Fusion” wherein Parthenope watches a priest bless the heirs of two mafia clans earlier than they ceremonially have intercourse in entrance of their whole households, a decrepit appearing trainer who refuses to indicate her face due to all her botched plastic surgical procedures, and a heart-stopping jump-scare courtesy of a grandfather clock. To Sorrentino, nothing may very well be extra terrifying to a lady than the specter of time passing.
A few of these issues are particularly evocative of Naples, such because the cholera epidemic of 1973 and the enervating scene about an indignant diva who so despises her hometown that she solely comes again to look down on the individuals who stay there. And but, nonetheless private it should be and clearly is for Sorrentino, the movie’s connection to the place that created him is nebulous in a method that makes it tough for the remainder of us to understand. To some extent it appears as if “Parthenope” is a requiem for the light great thing about town the place the siren is claimed to have washed up on shore, and Parthenope herself a stand-in for Naples’ regression from splendor to spoil. However has Sorrentino’s hometown actually gotten a lot much less enticing since his childhood, or is that the veil of youth has been lifted from his personal eyes, and he not appears on the world with the identical magic he as soon as did?
By that logic, Naples’ supposed ugliness would liberate him to understand the virtues which its appeal could as soon as have obscured, as “Parthenope” — which builds to one of the vital weird climaxes of any movie lately — is finally of the assumption that nice magnificence invitations deceit, distracting from a reality too uncooked or painful for folks to reckon with head-on. By the identical token, the movie maintains that younger individuals are just too attractive to understand life for its full splendor, as life is just too attractive for them to understand its richness in return. And so Parthenope can solely be blissful when she is free from the curse of her personal beautiful existence, although by the tip of Sorrentino’s movie it may’t assist however really feel as if he’s the one who’s blind to every part else.
Grade: C
“Parthenope” premiered in Competitors on the 2024 Cannes Movie Competition. A24 will launch it in theaters later this 12 months.