Speaking up for the male gaze, on show in his marvellous 2015 film Youth, Paolo Sorrentino told the Guardian: “Because women are a mystery to me, I tend to have positive projections on to them. Probably the fact that I don’t know them means I idealise them much more than I can with male characters.” Not so much a confession as a prediction, it turns out.
Parthenope is Sorrentino’s tenth feature film – his second set in his native Naples, following his autobiographical coming-of-age movie for Netflix in 2021, The Hand of God – and his first to have a female protagonist.
The body of Parthenope, one of the sirens of Greek mythology, was washed ashore in the bay of Naples, and her name given to the earliest Greek city in Italy, later refounded as Neapolis. Neapolitans remain known as Parthenopeans. Parthenope is more or less an act of worship of the city in the form of the girl and vice versa. “Naples is free, Naples is dangerous, Naples never judges, Naples is like Parthenope.” So Sorrentino, never one to mince, or perhaps weigh, his words, proclaims in his director’s note, as if the comparison could be missed.
The film opens with Parthenope’s birth, in the sea, in lovely Posillipo, masterminded by her imperious godfather, who has brought her, all the way from Versailles, a golden carriage for a bed. It is 1950. Parthenope’s brother Raimondo, and his friend Sandrino, the family housekeeper’s son, look on in amazement.
Within four minutes, we’ve been progressed to 1968, thus decisively skirting any paedophilic implications. The gorgeous Parthenope (photogenic Celeste Dalla Porta, 27) rises from the same waters in an ultramarine string bikini (the film, co-produced by Saint Laurent, has been brilliantly costume-directed by its creative director, Anthony Vaccarello). Sorrentino, we are immediately reminded, remains an undeflected devotee of the side breast.
Parthenope’s swain Sandrino (Dario Aita), utterly besotted, waits for her on terra firma, prepping her cigarette. She smokes with supreme style in almost every scene in which she appears. His first words? “You’re a goddess.” He’s right: she literally is. He can’t keep his eyes off her, and nor can the camera of the excellent director of photography, Daria D’Antonio, who also worked on The Hand of God.
Parthenope takes Sandrino into the family mansion and poses nude within the veils of the gilded bed. “Can I come inside?” he asks humbly. “No,” she replies, giggling, “but you may circle the carriage.” Both he and the camera do. Sandrino wants to get engaged but Parthenope tells him the future is bigger than both of them. “What are you thinking about?” he asks, a question almost all the men in the film put to her, in wonder. No reply comes. A mystery, then, women.
Parthenope remains free, enslaving all. Moving on to 1973, she, Sandrino and her dangerously devoted brother Raimondo (Daniele Rienzo) holiday on Capri. Her beauty causes consternation wherever she goes. Her favourite writer, John Cheever (Gary Oldman), also on the island, may be an alcoholic wreck but he understands. “Are you aware of the disruption your beauty causes?” he asks. When she begs to accompany him on his lonely stroll, he nobly replies: “No, because I don’t want to steal one minute of your youth from you.”
Parthenope considers becoming an actress, meeting an amazing acting coach Flora Malva (Isabella Ferrari), masked after an encounter with a Brazilian plastic surgeon, and an elderly Neapolitan star, Greta Cool (Luisa Ranieri), who despises her native city. Her key relationship is with her distinguished professor of anthropology (terrific Silvio Orlando), who guides her into learning to see and accept other lives without judging them.
Then, suddenly, Parthenope is 73 (Stefania Sandrelli), retired, alone, her youth gone. “Love as a means of survival has been a failure – or maybe not,” she says, she too wondering, at last, what she was thinking.
So bella figura conquers all. So much beauty, so senselessly. Sorrentino’s exquisitely Neapolitan sensibility is more enabled than compromised by the fact that he is also, on this evidence, a bear of very little brain.
“Parthenope” is in cinemas now
[See also: Bonfire of the bureaucrats]
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This article appears in the 30 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The War on Whitehall