Exotic coming-of-age story that explores link between beauty and unhappiness

Parthenope is a university student living a complicated life but although she is a ‘goddess’, the film built around her lacks depth.

Stephen Romei

Celeste Dalla Porta as Parthenope in Paolo Sorrentino’s film of the same name. Picture: Gianni Fiorito.

2 min read

12:22PMDecember 27, 2024

I’m a fan of Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino, who won a best foreign feature Oscar for his 2013 film, The Great Beauty. My other favourites are his 2015 English-language film, Youth, starring Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel, and his 2021 drama, The Hand of God.

His new film, Parthenope, has something in common with his previous works: it is gorgeous to look at, from the opening scenes in the Bay of Naples, to its final moments, decades later, in the same location.

What it lacks in comparison, however, is depth of story, emotional connection and character development. It’s a film for which “What’s it all about?” is not an unfair question.

I think it’s an exotic coming-of-age story that explores a link between beauty and unhappiness. As I watched I thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 novel, The Beautiful and the Damned.

The main character, Parthenope (Celeste Dalla Porta), is called a goddess in the opening moments, when she walks from the sea on to a beach, and I have no argument with that description. She lives in Naples, in a wealthy family, in a villa overlooking the bay, and has an older brother who is described as “fragile”.

Parthenope’s completing a degree in anthropology and is an honours student. She’s named after the Greek siren who, failing to lure a powerful man (Hercules in some stories, Odysseus in others), threw herself into the sea and drowned near Naples.

Parthenope does entice a lot of men, including rich and powerful ones. There’s also a semi-incestuous connection to her brother, and his fate becomes pivotal to how she sees herself in the world.

We follow her life from 1969, when she is 18 or so, to 1982. We do meet her older self, in 2023, towards the end, and her self-reflective, wistful observations touch on the main themes of the film.

The story unfolds in a series of set pieces. The best is in 1973 when she, her brother and one of her suitors are holidaying in Capri and she meets the alcoholic, depressed, American writer John Cheever (Gary Oldman).

When she tells him she has read all of his stories, he replies, “Life’s full of misfortunes”. Later, she helps him to his apartment, where the water view from the window is part obscured by dozens of empty gin bottles.

“Beauty’s like war,’’ he tells her. “It opens doors.” Some of the doors that open for her beauty, and her brains, take her into unusual rooms. One involves a sensual Catholic bishop who fancies becoming the pope.

Another reveals the living-behind-closed-doors son of her university professor. What happens is hard to believe. Another, when she walks through the poorer side of Naples, includes a deliberately unsexy sex scene.

She takes acting lessons for a while and meets a Naples-born movie star, Greta Cool (Luisa Ranieri), who in a speech to Neapolitans who have paid a fortune to see her trashes them and their city. “You are your own catastrophe.”

This film is not a love letter to beauty, or to Naples, the director’s home town. If its main message is that beauty is only skin deep, then what we see is a bit like watching a languorous, glamorous lifestyle commercial on the big screen to make that rather obvious point.