Parthenope? Eh. Nope.

Parthenope is my first Paolo Sorrentino film. I’ll give it this—it’s made me curious about his other work. From being a film dweeb, I know that he’s a well-regarded filmmaker, someone who folks get excited about. From seeing Parthenope, I know he and his collaborators can craft stunning montages and striking episodes that deftly balance the familiar and the bizarre and that they’re good at finding interesting faces. I’d like to check out Sorrentino and his crew’s oeuvre, both because of what’s stuck with me from reading folks who admire him and seeing Parthenope and because I intensely disliked Parthenope.

To be fair to the film, I may be missing some key context. While Parthenope is primarily concerned with pondering the nature of beauty through the life and times of its stupendously, almost supernaturally gorgeous title protagonist (Celeste Dalla Porta, and in the present-day-set epilogue Stefania Sandrelli), it maintains a running interest in the history of Italy in the back half of the 20th century. Major incidents occur that significantly impact Parthenope—most notably a massive student protest in the 1970s—but they are treated like something the audience would already know about and thus would not need any additional context. As a 33-year-old Pennsylvanian who does not know much about the cultural history of postwar-to-late-20th-century Italy, I do not have that context. Folks who do may see things in Parthenope that I cannot.

I can, however, see a beautiful, sometimes welcomely surreal movie that walls itself off from its heroine even while building the entirety of itself on her growth and transformation over the years. I can see a talented supporting cast who never get the space they need to become more than incidents in Parthenope’s life—a life about which her feelings never become clear. I can see technically impressive montages that point to rich veins of theme and texture that go underexplored. I can see a movie that claims depth and meaning while, for me, achieving neither.

I have no complaints about Sorrentino, cinematographer Daria D'antonio, editor Cristiano Travaglioli, and their team’s technical accomplishments. Carlo Poggioli’s costumes and Anthony Vaccarello of Saint Laurent’s costume direction deserve laurels—from the 1960s casual summer wear to what’s best described as “the Catholic Church’s Secret Holy Bejeweled Golden Lingerie.” There are episodes in the narrative where the strength of their craft breaks through the picture’s overall ponderousness and creates memorable cinema—standouts include a few hours in the life of Parthenope’s brother Raimondo (Daniele Rienzo) and Parthenope witnessing two families forging a bond through ritualized sex. But these sequences, for all their quality, are caught in the morass generated by Parthenope’s insistence on simultaneously sticking close to its protagonist while revealing almost nothing of who she is or how she sees the world.

Parthenope gives its heroine the material that could be the building blocks of an intriguing protagonist. From the moment she’s introduced—as a teenager watching a male friend watch her emerge from the ocean in a bikini—Parthenope is interested in how people perceive the world and each other. She loves the writing of John Cheever (Gary Oldman) and takes the opportunity to pick his brain when she runs into him on vacation. She knows that she is beautiful and considers pursuing acting because of the way people react to her beauty. She knows that her brother is probably in romantic love with her and almost certainly sexually attracted to her, and her feelings towards him on that front are ambiguous. Her great passion is anthropology, even though she and her cantankerous mentor freely admit that it’s an opaque and baffling discipline neither fully understands. 

All of this could make for a fascinating character study and an interesting point of view, but Parthenope never gets into its protagonist’s head. Porta builds a perpetual reserve into her performance—from Parthenope’s initially blissful youth to her comfortably ambivalent adulthood, she’s always got a level of guardedness. In practice, this results in a static protagonist whose development over the decades of her life is described more than shown. Parthenope’s brother, who, while important, doesn’t have anything close to her screen time, gets more interiority and internal complexity—his love of beauty and his self-loathing for his probable incestuous feelings for his sister and fragile health are explored and unpacked, and used to build his arc to a coherent conclusion. Parthenope doesn’t get that. While she changes as she grows and travels, why and how she regards those changes remains opaque. We see her but don’t get to know her—and that’s a mortal blow for the film.

Parthenope fails to say much about its protagonist, and this failure cascades. It wants to explore beauty and how perceptions of it shape people. Without exploring how Parthenope regards her beauty or what she finds beautiful, it amounts to “Man, Celeste Dalla Porta is beautiful!” She is! She’s gorgeous! But acknowledging that she is beautiful isn’t an exploration of beauty, its meaning, or its impact. Without delving into how Parthenope’s life shapes her, the many folks she meets and the adventures she has that ostensibly shape her life amount to “And then this happened, and that happened, and this happened…” Outside of her brother and John Cheever (both of whom have comparatively brief appearances and whose stories are intertwined), none of the ensemble feel like they’re impacting Parthenope—and, by extension, the audience. Interesting moments like Parthenope’s encounter with a diva (Luisa Ranieri) who has no time for her hometown, the bizarre sex ritual, and a late film event that makes Parthenope a cousin to Eraserhead of all films don’t cohere into a greater narrative whole or offer insights into the picture’s ostensible thematic interests. They also tend to overstay their welcome, particularly later in the film—the cousin-to-Eraserhead sequence is a big swing and a big miss and runs long enough to highlight and underline its failure.

Parthenope does not lack ambition—Sorrentino and company want to dig into beauty, the act of living, and postwar Italy. Technically, it’s impeccable. However, in its failure to explore its protagonist beyond chronicling the events that happen to her and its failure to capture her perspective on those events, Parthenope collapses in on itself. It left me annoyed and curious about the rest of Sorrentino’s work. He’s made films that resonate with folks and move and stick with them for positive reasons. Parthenope, by contrast, repelled me and has been lingering like a hangnail. This isn’t Sorrentino clicking. I want to see one of his works that clicks.