Parthenope: Gary Oldman can’t save this utterly vacuous love letter to Naples
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If all films were produced by Saint Laurent, as Parthenope very palpably is, our cinematic diet would be restricted to the following: exquisite clothes, gorgeous faces, and ambient wafts of first-world melancholy, often suggesting a perfume advert with all the models on the verge of tears.
Handily, this also describes the cinematic style of Italian sensualist Paolo Sorrentino to a tee. The Sorrentino x Saint Laurent collab, then, is too perfect a fit to be anything but friction-free: we get sumptuous reams of couture against the Neapolitan coastline in perfect sun. In human terms, it’s a non-starter.
Parthenope (Celeste Dalla Porta) is nothing if not a great beauty, to borrow the title of Sorrentino’s best-known film until now. Born in Naples in 1950 and named after the siren in Greek mythology who washed ashore there, she starts living up to that legacy the moment she enters adulthood in 1968.
If the various panting, smitten men in her orbit, including her own desperate brother Raimondo (Daniele Rienzo), may have been guilty of sneaking peeks a year or two sooner, Sorrentino won’t court the ick factor of showing their lechery a day before she’s 18.
As a brilliant young anthropology student shown doing literally no graft to sail through her courses fault-free, she’s supposed to be more than a preternaturally pretty face. And yet, for all Dalla Porta’s demure sophistication when dodging male attention (“sex is the funeral of desire”, she likes to explain), Sorrentino is disinterested in anything that might add up to a personality.
For 10 minutes, the film switches from Italian to English, when Parthenope meets a visiting Yank in cream suits, and helps him through a hangover. This turns out to be the author John Cheever, in a Gary Oldman cameo that’s plummy and overripe, but still manages to inject more vim than the listless episodes to come. Bowled over like the next man by her beauty, he’s also a tragic, closeted drunk who doesn’t want to steal away a second of this stunner’s youth.
She keeps on wasting it anyway, as the film self-defeatingly admits by having almost zero story. True, for a few years, she toys with becoming an actress, until being put off by separately meeting two older stars (Isabella Ferrari, Luisa Ranieri) – one disfigured by plastic surgery, one permanently bewigged, and both making the same bitchy quip about the other’s tastes in bed.
Jumping to 2023 at the very end allows The Conformist’s 77-year-old Stefania Sandrelli to take over the central role, but all she’s asked to do is wistfully remember her salad days as a megababe: “I was sad, and frivolous, determined, and listless” – like her native city, she adds. We’ve had two-hours-plus to leaf through this empty life, but Sorrentino makes it amount to almost nothing, except his usual love letter to Napoli, and an added ode to side-boob.
Cert tbc; 140 min. Screening at Cannes Film Festival. UK release date TBC
