Parthenope: Paolo Sorrentino’s swooning tribute to Naples puts beauty before plot

There are several versions of the myth of Parthenope. In one, she was a siren, who, heartbroken by her failure to seduce Ulysses, threw herself into the sea. After fishermen recovered her beautiful drowned body, they buried her, and the site of her interment grew into the city of Naples. In another, Parthenope was a mere mortal, in love with the centaur Vesuvius. Jealous, Zeus transformed her into the city of Naples and Vesuvius into the volcano that looms over it; its eruptions the outpouring of his endlessly frustrated desire. In all of them, Parthenope ends up a symbol of Neapolitan identity: preposterously beautiful, frustratingly tragic.

In Paolo Sorrentino’s previous love letter to the city of his birth, the autobiographical The Hand of God (2021), Naples was embodied by a legendary footballer and a pubescent teenage boy. That film was, by Sorrentino’s standards, a fairly pared back, realist affair, following the coming of age of the director’s avatar Fabietto (played by newcomer Filippo Scotti): tragicomedy in a minor key. As if to compensate for having sold the south short, Parthenope sees Sorrentino bring all the swooning sensuality of his Oscar-winning The Great Beauty (2013) to bear on the City of the Sun, imbuing it with a melancholic pulchritude befitting its eponymous heroine.

Parthenope herself, played for most of the film by the preternaturally lovely Celeste Dalla Porta, is twice born in the pellucid waters of the Mediterranean – first as a baby, her arrival heralded by the delivery of an ornate rococo carriage that her godfather has had transformed into a bed, and again as a lithe 18-year-old, emerging from the sea like Venus herself. Time and again, characters comment on the young woman’s beauty, which is “unforgettable but joyless”, “a cause of disruption”. Men swarm about her; even a helicopter hovering above her in the skies of Capri has the feeling of an adoring automaton (I was reminded of Christophe Honoré’s Metamorphoses, 2014, in which Zeus takes the form not of a bull but a truck). Some are led to their deaths, swallowed whole by the same waters that gave Parthenope life.

Her story unfolds as a kind of picaresque journey through her twenties and early thirties, during which she oscillates between sensual pleasures and intellectual pursuits, encapsulated by the choice of whether she will become an actress or an academic. A James Dean lookalike leads her through a brothel, lit by floating blue lights that look for all the world like luminescent sea creatures, to a seedy bar in which a pair of young lovers are forced to consummate their relationship before a watching crowd in act dubbed ‘La Grande Fusion’. A devilish priest, pock-marked and paunchy – a sleazy counterpart to Roberto Herlitzka’s would-be supreme pontiff in The Great Beauty – swathes her in ceremonial robes and fingers her in a cloister. But Parthenope also shares a sweet, chaste friendship with the writer John Cheever (an endearing Gary Oldman), whose work she admires, and a quasi-paternal relationship with the professor supervising her doctoral thesis, on the anthropology of the miraculous.

The swerve into 1970s academic life naturally evokes Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novel My Brilliant Friend (2011), tastefully adapted for TV by Sorrentino’s compatriot Saverio Costanzo (2018). By comparison Sorrentino’s film is, in the words of one character, “shabby and whimsical”. There’s no real plot to speak of, no overarching meaning to the metaphor. Parthenope – the film and the woman – drifts through a series of episodes that fail to connect or cohere. The film lacks the hyperbole of The Great Beauty, the pathos of Youth (2015), or the tenderness of The Hand of God. Many critics have dismissed it as an exercise in style.

But the images – the images! – are strange, gorgeous, aching things, set to the strains of composer Lele Marchitelli’s delicate piano score or the gravelly lament of classic Italian pop. Daria D’Antonio’s swooping, zooming camera halts, stunned, before a crab-like vehicle adorned with angular protuberances as it creeps along the seafront, spraying disinfectant in an attempt to ward off cholera. We’re shown an ageing actress, face covered with a mask to hide the shame of botched plastic surgery, who weeps upon a bed flooded with dolls, lamenting that “maternity has followed me everywhere”. Towards the end, a door opens on to a sequestered child, whose long-awaited appearance is the film’s most marvellous – if also most risible – revelation. It is grotesque, magical, beautiful and tragic; awash with corruption and innocence and terrible poverty and mad decadence. In short, a perfect tribute to Sorrentino’s “dear, awful Naples”. 

► Parthenope is in UK cinemas from 2 May.