“It’s impossible to be happy in the most beautiful place in the world.” And according to director Paolo Sorrentinothe most beautiful place in the world is Naples, his hometown — a city he once abandoned and which perhaps only recently he has come to accept. Parthenopehis new film — the only Italian title in the Official Selection of Cannes 2024 — is dedicated to the city, both beautiful and impossible. It’s a film that, although spanning an entire lifetime within its narrative arc, tends to focus on youth, the most discussed and beloved age of all.
The film opens with the wailing of a little girl destined to be a goddess, a princess, judged by the gift a family friend has brought for her: a sumptuous carriage hailing from Versailles and transported by sea. The year is 1950 when the girl was born in the Gulf of Naples, at Palazzo Donn’Anna in Mergellina, played by newcomer Celeste Dalla Porta (who as an adult is portrayed by Stefania Sandrelli). Youth in Parthenope corresponds with several crucial moments in contemporary Neapolitan history: the student and youth protests, cholera, the earthquake, and the recent celebration of Naples’s scudetto.
Parthenope is a mosaic. It’s a mature man’s look at his homeland and at femininity. It’s also not Sorrentino’s most successful film, though certainly one that will represent a watershed moment between his filmography of yesterday and that of tomorrow. A film in which the most important focus is “a love letter” to this special land: a city where there’s always room for everyone. Frivolous and determined, alive and alone. “Love letters I was never able to write. It was to be a film about two mysteries, one was the woman and the other Naples. I gave up the ambition to recount a woman from the very beginning, because I don’t think it it was my job as a man to do that, but I tried to relate the feminine side of me to that of a female character,” explained the director.
The filming of Parthenope took place between Naples and Caprireaching as far as Genoa. The characters and the viewer experience these places between day and night in which there are perceptible references to the cinema of greats such as Fellini and perhaps even Bertolucci, as well as a clear and obvious reference to The Gold of Naples. And speaking of physical places, the center of Naples is certainly recognizable, with Via San Carlo, the Santa Lucia neighborhood, Via Caracciolo and Via Partenope along the beach, on to the Diaz roundabout and Castel dell’Ovo, not to mention the headquarters of the University of Naples Federico II and the Certosa di San Martino.
And while its the goddess Parthenope to drive the narrative, two especially interesting characters in the film come in the form of a university professor of anthropology (played by Silvio Orlando) and a real-life American writer, John Cheever (played by Gary Oldman) . We meet the latter in Capri, portrayed as a sad, bored man with no creative drive left toward the end of his life. A man and an artist lost inside an ever-fascinating Capri (between its famous little square and its spectacular Faraglioni), looking for something that he can’t find. A man on an island that is itself an island.
