It’s no secret that Paolo Sorrentino is deeply obsessed with youth and beauty. That commitment, and many others, is evident in films like “Youth” and “Great Beauty.” As their titles suggest, these films are unrestrained expressions of Italian maximalism.
Following 2021’s achingly personal Hand of God, the Neapolitan director filtered the pain and ecstasy of his formative years through the same veil of Fellini-esque blasphemy he had previously cast on his film about Silvio Berlusconi and his fading glory. In A History of Rome, Sorrentino returned to proverbial travesty with another vast parade of bodies, obsessed with abstract ideals rather than life itself. Once again he returns with an exquisitely extravagant film in which the lines between the sacred and the profane are blurred until sex feels like religion and religion feels like sex. And once again he is driven by the siren song of youth and great beauty.
In “Partenope,” which borrows its name from one of the sirens of Greek mythology, Sorrentino is preternaturally obsessed with this relationship. while Youth and great beauty. This is not the first time he has pitted these twin drunkards against each other, contrasting the fleeting nature of human desire with the eternal spirit of the poetry, architecture, and gods we create in retaliation for that fact. . But with “Partenope,” the 53-year-old filmmaker dares to question whether it’s possible to separate the two. Moreover, he questions whether people can fully appreciate both at the same time.
But in reality, “Partenope” is just a feature film made by a middle-aged man who nearly goes mad trying to imagine what life would be like as an impossibly sexy woman. It’s a mystery that has haunted male artists for as long as they’ve dreamed of possessing the beauty of a muse, and Sorrentino’s efforts to unravel it feel as anachronistic in 2024 as giving birth to an ancient Greek sea creature in the summer of 1950. But maybe some impulses are more timeless than we realise.
Legend has it that Partenope committed suicide by drowning in the sea because her singing failed to seduce Odysseus, and her body eventually washed up on the shores of Naples. In “Partenope” (Paolo’s version), a mythical beauty is born into a wealthy family that owns a stunning villa on the water’s edge, and in a lighter, more frenetic development of “Teorema”, a mythical beauty is slowly brought to her home by an innocent creature. It drives me crazy. People who come into their lives.
Partenope, played by newcomer and breakout star Celeste Dalla Porta, is a male fantasy incarnate, with such striking, natural beauty that she lures men onto her shipwreck. This is less a critique of Sorrentino’s film than a description of its premise, a claim the writer-director quickly acknowledges as he attempts to unravel Partenope’s allure, and ultimately exposes it with a bitterness disguised as the stuff of sublime revelation. From the start, everyone wants Partenope, but no one can keep her. “She’s always running away,” laments one of the film’s countless suitors. “And that’s why men love her.”
Partenope’s sensitive curiosity is matched by her eagerness to learn. “I don’t know anything, but I love everything,” she sighs, her face brighter and poutier than the average person’s most ecstatic smile. Fortunately for Partenope, Italy has many willing teachers. Teachers like Sandrino (Dario Aita), the housekeeper’s son, flatter Partenope for the first 18 years of her life, and her beauty is too inexplicable for men to fathom, so men are always attracted to her. He tells Partenope that he wants to know what she’s thinking. And her unfortunate brother Raimondo (Daniele Rienzo) teaches Partenope that even her blood relatives cannot escape the adoration she evokes. It’s a small mercy that Sorrentino relegated these incestuous impulses to the periphery of the action, allowing her poetic tragedy to drive the plot from a safe distance.
Of course, using the word “plot” is loaded when it comes to Paolo Sorrentino’s films, as the director is less a storyteller and more like a moving circus ringmaster. In Sorrentino tradition, spanning decades, Partenope doesn’t insist on simple cause and effect, but rather seems to spiral through the years, trying to unearth undiscovered meaning within them. Partenope is considerably less dreamy than the director’s earlier work, but much of the film seems to exist in a vague, non-timeless space, albeit with a strange sense of unreality.
That’s certainly true of the extended scene in which Partenope bumps into American author John Cheever (an “alcoholic, depressed, brilliant” Gary Oldman, looking slightly groomed from the set of “Slow Horses”). The two pass each other at a resort, in the midst of a summer in which Partenope is first truly coming into her own (shortly after a man is so overwhelmed by her beauty that he asks her out on a date from a helicopter in mid-flight), and they feel a connection because the closeted gay novelist is the first man Partenope has ever met who doesn’t want to have sex with her. It’s Sorrentino’s technique, and you almost wish he’d just get away with it, as calm as he tries, but his Cheever can only utter so many clichés before you start to feel like you’re watching the most beautifully filmed audiobook ever. “Desire is a mystery, and sex is its funeral.” “Beauty is like war, it opens the doors.” “Art is the triumph over chaos.” That last quote doesn’t appear in the film, but it tells you why John Cheever is the way he is.
Needless to say, he took up a lot of Partenope’s time for a man who claimed he didn’t want to waste a minute of her youth. An earlier, more significant exchange occurred when another older man asked Partenope if she would marry him if he were 40 years younger. Partenope prides herself on having her answer for everything, and her real question is, will she get married? she What if she was 40 years older?
The film’s opening moments recall Partenope’s fleeting youth with a sharpness bordering on malice, as Sorrentino exacts a gendered revenge against women for only temporarily having the power to drive men crazy. Preoccupied with the idea that a lack of self-awareness makes one mysterious, “Partenope” denies any interiority to the reality from which it takes its name, convinced that depriving us of the opportunity to understand her perspective might somehow enhance her rhetorical value. Here, objectification is portrayed as a means to an end, and while Celeste Dalla Parta is truly one of the most photogenic human beings I’ve ever seen (Partenope is peppered with so many perfect, straightforward close-ups that they feel like classical Greek busts), the range she shows later in the film suggests that Sorrentino has underutilized her talents as an actress.
This all foreshadows Partenope’s time as an anthropology student, where she is mentored by a grumpy old professor named Devoto Marotta (a wonderful Silvio Orlando). He’s such a good teacher that he doesn’t even try to tell her what anthropology really is. teeth, a mystery that only he can answer. Sorrentino will stick his pin in as a skeleton key for this film and return to it again with a profound flurry of wind created in the final minutes, but his sensuous impulses don’t linger on this piece for more than a scene or two at a time. refuse to do so.
Instead, he indulges himself, roaming through his own epic imagination, a journey to nowhere that includes unpredictable pit stops like a cholera outbreak, the “Great Fusion” in which Partenope watches as a priest blesses the heirs of two Mafia families before they have ritual sex in front of the whole family, an aging drama teacher who refuses to show his face after a botched plastic surgery, and a heart-stopping, startling scene with a grandfather clock. For Sorrentino, nothing is more frightening for a woman than the threat of time passing.
Some of these are particularly reminiscent of Naples, such as the cholera epidemic of 1973 and the unnerving scene of an angry diva who despises her hometown and returns only to look down on the people who live there. But no matter how personal it must be to Sorrentino, and how clearly it is for Sorrentino, the film’s connection to the place that produced him is ambiguous in some ways, and in others It’s difficult to understand. In a sense, Partenope is a requiem for the faded beauty of the city where sirens are said to have washed ashore, and Partenope itself is a stand-in for Naples, symbolizing its retreat from prosperity to ruin. It also looks like But has Sorrentino’s hometown really become less attractive since childhood, or has the veil of youth been removed from his eyes and he no longer sees the world with the same magic as he once did? Or?
According to that logic, Napoli’s so-called ugliness would free him to appreciate the virtues once obscured by its charm. Building to one of the strangest climaxes in recent cinema, Partenope ultimately explores the belief that great beauty can be deceptive, distracting from truths too raw and painful for people to face head-on. Based on. Similarly, the film argues that young people are simply too beautiful to fully appreciate the wonders of life, and that life is too beautiful for young people to appreciate its richness in return. . So while Partenope can only be happy once she is freed from the curse of her own spectacular existence, by the end of Sorrentino’s film it feels as if he is the one blinded to everything else. I have no choice but to.
Rating: C
“Partenope” premiered in competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. A24 is scheduled to be released in theaters later this year.
