There’s no getting around the truth that Italian writer/director Paolo Sorrentino (an Oscar-winner for 2014’s The Great Beauty; The Hand of God) is in love with beauty. Often, he focuses on the beauty of location or the difficult-to-pin-down beauty of raw emotions, such as love and sorrow. But for one of the few times in his long career, in Parthenope he centers on female beauty, specifically the frequently distracting and destructive external physical form of a woman of the same name (newcomer Celeste Dalla Porta), born in Naples circa 1950 and deeply in love with the place and people where she grew up.
We first see Parthenope at age 18, rising out of the water in a revealing swimsuit, smoking, and striking dumb a man on the beach with his eyes fixed on her. As aware as she is that every man wants her, what Parthenope truly craves is intellectual stimulation. She hopes that her looks will afford her a certain independence to pursue whatever and whomever she wants. But at her youthful age, she isn’t even clear what she would do with such freedom. Instead, all she sees around her are men who want to possess and control her. In other words, she’s a young woman with a superpower she can’t quite control.
She has a brother, Raimondo (Daniele Rienzo), who’s as in love with her as every other man—a situation that can lead to nothing but destruction and heartbreak. They have a mutual friend, Sandrino (Dario Atia), a young man from the area who becomes the first love (or at least the first we see) of her life. Around this time, she also meets the older American writer, John Cheever (Gary Oldman), who is fascinated by Parthenope but does not fawn over her the way other men do; he’s a closeted gay alcoholic, so that may have something to do with it. But the two find a connection in their mutual unfulfilled existence.
Parthenope doesn’t move through time like other movies; it merely drifts from moment to moment, sometimes jumping ahead many years at a time. Our great beauty considers many professions along the way but eventually settles on one of her longtime passions, anthropology, thanks to a professor friend of hers who was one of the few men not to get lost in her charms, but instead challenge her about the very definition of the science she’s chosen as a career. “What is anthropology?” he repeatedly asks her, and the fact that she doesn’t know how to put it into words seems to elevate her in his eyes.
The film is esoteric, surreal and profoundly romantic, yet also feels hollow, as if it's a simple story searching for a deeper meaning that it never finds. That doesn’t entirely take away from its intrinsic value. The further we dive into Parthenope’s life and thoughts, the more we wonder what’s going on in her mind, and we must contend with the fact that we may never truly know. At a certain point, I realized that the film would be something of a disappointment if it didn’t give us some insight into our heroine’s deepest, most existential thoughts, and it never does.
She seems more and more disappointed with her life as she gets older, but we sense that she likely wouldn’t change anything about the way she lived it. She and the film are contradictions, which normally wouldn’t bother me. But when you combine that with a seemingly soulless lead character, it simply leaves us empty and unfulfilled, much like Parthenope. By keeping her thoughts from us, Parthenope keeps its audience at a distance and fails to find the connection with her that we so desperately want to truly appreciate her plight.
The film begins its theatrical run on Friday.
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