CANNES Paolo Sorrentino hides behind his cigar in his speech, as imaginative as his films. When the smoke rises and clears, like the wind that became a stylistic mark for Fellini, and which appears exactly as it does in the scabrous sexual scene in the church, the number 7 seems to stand out, gigantic: in the world of symbols it is the “perfect one” and magical”, 7 like the kings and hills of Rome (let’s also include Walt Disney’s dwarfs).
In the 77th edition of the festival, Sorrentino with his increasingly sophisticated epic of feelings is at the festival for the seventh time with Parthenope.
The celebrities, Silvio Orlando, Luisa Ranieri, Stefania Sandrelli, Isabella Ferrari, Gary Oldman in the role of the writer John Cheever who never left the bottle, are the chorus. In the center the still unknown Celeste Dalla Porta. In the first image she emerges like a mermaid from the water and gives the film its name, as a vestal virgin, while her first love kisses a crucifix.
Naples is the landscape of a shell that collects the entire human comedy: melancholy, loneliness, desire, in the youth that passes and goes away. And therefore the deception and terribleness of beauty.
Is it a film about regret?
«It’s there in other films of mine, not here, even if I put my missed youth, dreamed of rather than lived. Here is the passage of age. The main characteristic of youth is that the truth is not part of it, and if it presents itself it is a removed accident. When you are young you are disoriented, you abandon yourself, you make epic speeches about yourself, you dance alone. This story ends when we move, as Kiergegaard said, from aesthetic life to ethical life, that is, when we are responsible and become what we are and don’t like. The only possibility remains that of being amazed, as happens here, where we follow a girl who seeks freedom but wrong choices lead her to solitude, her enchantment for the world, whereas in Great beauty the opposite happened, that is a disenchanted look at the world.”
The plot is elusive.
«My teacher, Antonio Capuano, said that writing dialogues is like playing the piano by ear: either you know how to play it or you don’t. You either have the talent to write or you don’t. This film was born from the desire to compete with two mysteries: Naples and women. For a long stretch they overlap.”
He bet on an unknown 26 year old actress.
«You, Milanese, have an aptitude for accents. And she has the ability to interpret an 18 year old as well as a 35 year old, without resorting to laborious artifices. She possesses a sort of inscrutable pain that Stefania Sandrelli had in I knew her well of Pietrangeli”.
For the first time it places a woman at the centre.
«The role of Parthenope, an aspiring actress who, as an adult with the face of Sandrelli, becomes a university professor, was defined during the work. I told Celeste everything and the opposite of everything. I tried to figure out who she was, since she was the only one I didn’t know. Telling a woman is not a man’s job. I was interested in combining my feminine side with a female character on the theme of the passage of time. Parthenope wants to be an actress, the characters of Isabella (the forgotten diva who speaks under a mask) and Luisa (who criticizes the clichés of which Naples is the victim, and does not do Sophia Loren as it might seem), are too. The two of them explain what it means to live with that shapeless thing that is success.”
What is the professor like?
«It brings us back to reality, where everything else tends to overflow the role of Silvio Orlando, a father figure, is the narrative one. With him, Parthenope discovers pain. Pain and seduction are forms of fast communication, they represent the ability to skip forms, the unbearable apparatus that we put in place every day to tell ourselves something interesting.”
You, the only Italian in the race.
«I’m fine alone. I’m happy and excited, I exploded at Cannes, without Cannes I wouldn’t have made all the films I’ve made.”
«It is a free, dangerous city, it never judges, indefinite, mysterious. Like Parthenope. Scholars say better than me how the sacred and the profane merge. I tell a universal reality, I didn’t make the film just for Neapolitans. When I started making them, I thought the first one would also be the last. It’s a feeling that continues every time.”
Would you return to live in Naples?
He pauses for a cigar, savors it, brings it to his lips, smells the stickiness of the question and says: “I live where my wife says.”
