In 1950, a baby girl is, like the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite, born literally in the sea, and named Parthenope – after the mythic Siren whom Zeus metamorphosed into the the girl’s birthplace Naples (and whose name was the ancient word for the city). And so, in the Seventies and Eighties, the coming of age of this young woman (Celeste della Porta) – her near incestuous relationship with her suicidal brother, her trysts with various men (including a supposedly miracle-working Papal candidate), and her pursuit of an academic career (in anthropology) with a brief detour in acting – is figured both as mythic fairytale and Neapolitan allegory.
Spanning its heroine’s life, Paolo Sorrentino’s latest feature Parthenope is full of bizarre incidents and surreal imagery that can be hard to synthesise into a significant bigger picture. While each of its episodes is entertaining in its own right, there is a lack of coherence to the whole that make it easy to imagine the film being essentially the same if it lost this or that part of itself. Yet the one constant here is beauty: not just Parthenope’s own celebrated appearance, making her all at once a coveted object of adoration and a subject confused by this fleeting power she has over others; but also the exquisite cinematography of Daria D’Antonio, framing Parthenope’s journey through life as a highly aestheticised fever dream cum parable.
This is mesmerising, miraculous yet melancholic cinéma du look – a stylised, synaesthetic city symphony full of swooning, summery colours.
strap: Paolo Sorrentino’s city symphony offers a stylised panoramic parable of Naples, embodied in a semi-mythologised woman
Anton Bitel
