Paolo Sorrentino’s Unsatisfying Ode to Naples

There’s much to appreciate in Parthenope, Paolo Sorrentino’s second consecutive bittersweet paean to his home city of Naples. At least for a while, before the too-muchness of it takes hold and the character at the center stops being intriguing and just becomes a siren with an air of mystery but too little evidence of all that’s supposedly going on behind it. While Hand of God shimmered with the director’s memories of his youth, the deeply personal nature and intimacy of that film are drowned here by ostentation.

The craft aspects, as always, are exquisite and the visuals so lush and alive they threaten to jump off the screen. But this is a movie whose eponymous protagonist — her name is the one originally given to Naples by the Greeks in the 8th century BC — becomes more distant and unknowable the more time we spend with her.

Unlike Toni Servillo’s similarly remote character in The Great Beauty, whose palpable yearning drew us in, Parthenope becomes a gorgeous cipher. That might also have had something to do with a male protagonist being less subject to the prurient aspects of Sorrentino’s gaze.

The film gets off to an enthralling start and also concludes on a resonant note, when the eternally captivating Stefania Sandrelli steps in to play Parthenope in her 70s, returning to Naples after a long absence.

The closing image — of her sighing as she rediscovers the fickle euphoria of enchantment while watching a truckload of celebratory soccer fans pass by — in a single instant returns the emotional interiority that has been steadily stripped from the character by a script more interested in the enigma of Parthenope than in the devastating loss and disillusionment that shape her life.

Sorrentino opens with characteristic opulence as a golden canopy bed allegedly from Versailles is transported across the Bay of Naples in 1950. It’s a gift from puffed up local shipping magnate the Commendatore (Alfonso Santagata) to Sasa’ (Lorenzo Gleijeses) and Maggie (Silvia Degrandi), a young couple about to have their second child. Il Commendatore is godfather to their first.

The new baby is delivered by midwives in the pristine waters of the bay directly below the family villa; they name her Parthenope. Sorrentino then skips forward to 1968 to find Parthenope (Celeste Dalla Porta) wafting around in a bikini being worshipped by the maid’s son, Sandrino (Dario Aita) — and also by her older brother, Raimondo (Daniele Rienzo).

In 1973, Raimondo convinces Parthenope and Sandrino to accompany him to Capri, a time they will remember as a golden summer that ended abruptly. Raimondo pursues his own pleasures while Sandrino gazes in a dreamy-eyed stupor at Parthenope as she swats off suitors, always with a quick retort at the ready.

Parthenope takes an interest in the jaded writer John Cheever (Gary Oldman, not around long enough to do much), whose stories she has read. “Are you aware of the disruption your beauty causes?” he asks her, while pickling in booze and regret. A wealthy playboy sends invitations down to her from his helicopter, but Parthenope puts him off by admitting she would only sleep with him as a courtesy. “Desire is a mystery and sex is its funeral,” she tells him, a line typical of a script that never tires of speaking in aphorisms.

Their island idyll is cut short by tragedy, which coincides with a cholera outbreak in the city. A trucks crawls through town spraying disinfectant from tentacle-like hoses, making it look like a giant bug as it blocks the path of a funeral procession. Sorrentino has a gift for these types of arresting images, but it’s also around this point that the film starts to lose focus, its visual flourishes meant to distract us like shiny objects.

At university, Parthenope reveals herself to be a student gifted with both knowledge and curiosity. She earns the rarely bestowed respect of irritable anthropology professor Devoto Marotta (Silvio Orlando), who encourages her ambitions to work in academia.

Before she settles on a future path, Parthenope briefly explores the idea of a career in movies. She consults acting coach Flora Malva (Isabella Ferrari), who wears a full-face mesh mask to hide the butchery of a Brazilian plastic surgeon. And she has an encounter with a famous diva, Greta Cool (Luisa Ranieri), who returns to Naples as an honored ceremonial guest and then proceeds to trash the city, calling it a dead place of lowlifes and vulgarians.

It goes on like this with interludes intended to have a cumulative bearing on Parthenope’s sentimental education; instead, they add up to less and less as the story drifts into obscurantism. Despite all the richness hitting our eyeballs, it starts to seem empty.

Sorrentino’s taste for extravagant imagery makes the director indulge his worst instincts, lapsing as he often has in the past into ersatz Fellini with a New Year’s celebration that draws rich and poor out onto the streets to watch the fireworks over the gulf.

Cinematographer Daria D’Antonio, who also shot Hand of God, serves up no shortage of sumptuous compositions, and the elegant camerawork ensures that there’s always something interesting to look at, celebrating Naples in all its shabby-splendid glory. Just the crispness of the light is dazzling.

A sequence early on, which may owe something to the influence of one of the producers, YSL creative director Anthony Vaccarello, follows Raimondo and his friends into the heart of Naples to watch the city “get undressed” with the arrival of spring. The montage of women shedding their jackets and cardigans to reveal bare shoulders and necks and cleavage is certainly beautiful, but it’s really not much more than glossy fetishization.

Parthenope’s adventures become increasingly arcane — she joins a crowd of dignitaries to witness a young couple consummating the union of two great Neapolitan families; and gets caught up with a horny bishop (Peppe Lanzetta) during the Feast of San Gennaro.

While Sorrentino views these episodes as the sacred moments of a life enshrined in memory, pontificating about time and love in flowery dialogue, the director can’t get out of his own way long enough to tell Parthenope’s story. And Dalla Porta can’t build a flesh-and-blood character out of a woman who seems as billowy and insubstantial as the movie that bears her name.

When the narrative skips forward by 30 years to reveal where life has taken Parthenope, her story finally acquires some poignancy. But it’s too little too late.