Paolo Sorrentino's latest film, 'Parthenope,' explores themes of beauty, longing, and the passage of time through the lens of a young woman's coming-of-age story in 1970s Naples.
It’s tempting to say Paolo Sorrentino ’s films resemble ads, but on reflection there aren’t many ads that resemble films by Paolo Sorrentino . The exceptions are mostly those ads directed by Sorrentino , like the one he did in 2022 for Bulgari, with Anne Hathaway and Zendaya twirling in a Roman villa, while petals rain from the ceiling and a peacock twitches its tail.
In Parthenope, Sorrentino strives to maintain the same lyrically deranged mood over more than two hours, aided by a different pair of collaborators. The first is the city of Naples, like a colored ribbon unfurled between sky and sea. The second is the 26-year-old star Celeste Dalla Porta, who is more or less a newcomer to the screen (she had a bit part in Sorrentino’s last film Youthful heroine Parthenope is meant to be impossibly beautiful, and no one will deny Dalla Porta fits the bill. What she does in the film is closer to modeling than acting in the usual sense: she strolls through her scenes giving wry, tender, knowing glances, implying deep feelings without entirely letting on what they might be. But this, too, fits the conception of the character, who is really less a character than a symbol – representing Naples, or the idea of beauty itself, in an almost impersonal way. Coming of age in the theoretically tumultuous 1970s, Parthenope loves the world but keeps her distance: even when she lets herself be seduced by one of her many admirers, the rapture never lasts. Her one abiding passion is for study, at which she excels, and for her crusty academic mentor (Silvio Orlando), whose bond with her is platonic in the strictest sense. Still, miracles do happen: one moment she’s reading the short stories of John Cheever, the next Cheever himself (Gary Oldman) manifests in person like a genie, scattering pearls of jaded wisdom (“Beauty is like war”) and nearly falling off his chair. Terms such as “allegory” and “magic realism” undoubtedly appl
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