Paolo Sorrentino doesn’t want to hear about Parthenope – his tenth film, the sixth in competition at Cannes and the only Italian title in the running for the Palme d’Or this year – like a ‘love letter to Naples’: “I’ve never known how to write love letters” love, and here there is not even regret or nostalgia or melancholy, as in my other previous films. Here is simply the passage of age: truth does not belong to youth, it is a place where one deals with insincerity. You are carefree, you abandon yourself, you create an epic tale of yourself. This story of oneself is interrupted at a certain point when one enters what Kierkegaard calls the ‘ethical life’, one becomes responsible, one becomes oneself, and often one does not like oneself but one accepts oneself, and the only possibility that you have to surprise yourself once again, as happens to Stefania Sandrelli in my finale”.
Parthenope it is an extreme aesthetic manifesto, without compromising with the conventions that according to the standards should ride on the current taste of the public. It is the luxury that an author who boasts a more brilliant international status than any of our living directors can afford. It is Naples with its exclusive branch, Capri. But not like the Roma de The great beauty: in the form of an endless metaphor, almost the fantasy avatar of the autobiographical It was the hand of God. The narrative and stylistic dilation is not exactly there cup of tea of the habitual consumer of superheroes and action movies: he could risk side effects.
Parthenope is both a woman of flesh and the mermaid of myth, born from the sea. Speaking of the double track, real and symbolic, that structures the story, the director explains that “it comes from the desire to deal with two mysteries: the Woman and Naples”. In this case “the two mysteries overlap for a long stretch”. The protagonist Celeste Della Porta has the face of an angel and the body of a top model. In the heavy and unforgivable male jargon, she would be called a ‘pussy’. She invades the screen, magnetizes male desires like the sirens sung by Homer, the camera’s eye explores her and exalts her to the point of harassment, as the most severe feminists will surely object. If an aged and ‘resolved’ Parthenope appears at the end, the entire film is in a Proustian way in the shadow of the blossoming girls.
And the characters, the events he encounters, which punctuate the contradictory portrait of a city with its poverty and nobility, are like the figurines of the Neapolitan nativity scene: not the ordinary ones but the extra ‘guests’, who vary from year to year according to the ‘actuality. There is the figurine of the perpetually drunk Great Writer, Gary Oldman who impersonates John Cheever, cult author of the mermaid girl. There is the legendary Commander Lauro, the one who gave you the number two shoe if you voted well. There is the Camorra Boss who takes Beauty to the humiliating spectacle of public coitus between the scions of two merging ‘families’. There is Bishop Beppe Lanzetta who masturbates Parhenope naked under the gold flowers of San Gennaro: “Neither provocative nor transgressive”, according to the director. Isabella Ferrari teaches acting, but a thick veil hides facelift scars.
Parthenope grows up divided between two inseparable loves, Sandrino (Dario Alta) and Raimondo (Daniele Rienzo), her brother. But there is an insurmountable taboo between Raimondo and the object of her desire: she will end up committing suicide. The most irresistible figurine of her is Luisa Ranieri, decorated like Sofia Loren, with Sofia Loren’s (fake) curls and Sofia Loren’s glasses. “She is not Loren”, assures Sorrentino. Which puts an unscripted invective into her mouth: “The problem is you Neapolitans. You are depressed and you don’t know it. You are poor, cowardly, crybaby, backward, and always ready to blame someone else. I’m going back to the North: I’m saved, but you’re not: you’re dead.”
But Parthenope is not just a magnificent shell, he studies anthropology with profit. And he will choose teaching in life, surrounded only by the affection of his students. His professor. of youth, Silvio Orlando, embodies the strong, disenchanted pivot of Neapolitan culture and thought. He explains to her that anthropology, in its essence, is ‘seeing’, and that seeing is very difficult, “because it is the last thing you learn”. Only when he is certain that her pupil has learned to ‘see’, does he introduce her to her beloved son, a giant, monstrous and gentle freak ‘made of water and salt, like the sea’. And she says: “It’s beautiful”.
