Parthenope

Paolo Sorrentino’s latest sun-drenched film is a visual feast, even as it skips lightly over subjects it would benefit from mining. Celeste Dalla Porta, in a career-igniting central performance, portrays the bewitching intellectual Parthenope Di Sangro, who comes of age during Italy’s turbulent Years of Lead, which saw widespread political violence. Parthenope remains an anchor for the audience in a film that swirls around her and the ever-changing Naples she calls home. It’s a story awash with vivid colour and light whilst deeper themes drift by.

Sorrentino is in familiar territory here, tackling love, religion, recent Italian history and politics, and the incursion of the mystical in the characters’ firmly rooted lives. The film’s structure allows it to serve almost as a highlights reel of his previous topics, as Parthenope encounters a string of individuals who teach a syllabus of pain and hard-earned knowledge. Standout among these are Gary Oldman as self-exiled writer John Cheever, Peppe Lanzetta as the grubby and lusting Cardinal Tesorone, and Silvio Orlando as the stringent professor who challenges Parthenope to see beyond the surface. All three and more help the young woman accept Socrates’ maxim: all she knows is that she knows nothing.

The wide variety of figures she meets, and the simplicity of the overall message they impart, summarises the film’s main issue. The story attempts to give its protagonist a crash course in the Western Canon as well as the dangers of sex, the power her beauty holds, and the beginnings of mystic understanding, but never grasps any areas of interest for long. Any consequent examination feels surface-level. Characters o?er the opening lines of each topic’s Cliffnotes summary, and in doing so give the audience little to hang their interest on.

This alone could be forgiven were the film’s pace as quick as Parthenope’s wit. The wavering momentum works at specific points for both the setting and narrative (particularly during an o?screen death scene brilliantly implied by focusing on water lapping on a cliffside), but doesn’t yield results when you put any of the major topics being discussed — each of which a whole film could have been made about on its own — under scrutiny. Two hours and fifteen minutes appears to stretch into a week, similar to a hot, boring day at the beach that goes on forever, the sun refusing to set even though you’ve been tired for some time now. While I wouldn’t cut off the ending, which is well-executed, it would benefit from trims across the whole.

Some of the machismo commonplace in Italian filmmaking is on display as well, wherein beautiful young women choose to bed older unattractive men who appear to lack any charisma or grace. Fans of Sorrentino will likely find things to love in Parthenope, but newcomers to the filmmaker’s world may struggle to remain engaged. There is a lot to learn and not a lot of time to do so; they will be the ones left contemplating whether this has been time well spent.