Original caricature by Jeff York of Celeste Dalla Porta as the title character in PARTHENOPE (copyright 2025)
The character of PARTHENOPE is much like the film that bears her name. Beautiful, sensual, and mysterious, also vexing and even aggravating. What does this young woman, named for a Greek siren, want out of life? Is she a sensualist or more practical? Is she philosophical, or merely a pseudo-intellectual? Is she voracious, consuming all the men who pass her way, or is Parthenope merely a tease?
For that matter, is this film a put-on, a satire of all those European films from the ’60s and ’70s like THE LIBERTINE, CLAIRE’S KNEE, or EMMANUELLE where an unattainable young woman drives the male population around her batty? Or is this a serious character study of a woman who’s smart as a whip, but is cursed with being gorgeous, and therefore struggling to find out where she fits in? After well over a two-hour run, I still wasn’t sure. PARTHENOPE may very well be the most confounding film I’ve seen in many a moon. Still, with Celeste Dalla Porta in the title role and gorgeous cinematography throughout, the film is easy on the eyes as it taxes the brain.
PARTHENOPE (pronounced Par-THEN-no-pee) starts pretentiously as a child is born in a watery birth off a beach in Naples circa 1958 and the babe seems to immediately mesmerize the entire local population. Parthenope is not exactly a messiah, but everyone who encounters her seems to look to the heavens in appreciation. She’s gorgeous, personable, and even bewitching. Parthenope’s rich family is obsessed with her, as are the many lecherous men in the community. Upon her 18th birthday, her boisterous grandfather asks her if she’d find him attractive if he was 40 years younger. She pithily asks him if he’d find her attractive if she was 40 years older. Parthenope seems to be quite self-aware, asking bigger questions of life, but then why does the film showcase her avidly pursuing hedonistic delights for so much of its run time? She smokes, drinks, frolics in barely-there frocks, and makes out with men she’s just met. It starts to feel salacious, lacking in substance, like the kind of R-rated fare Sylvia Kristel slept-walked through during her career.
During a good hour of gorgeous distraction, including ridiculously manicured mansions and pristine private beach settings, Parthenope is approached about becoming a model, and an actress, and then, for 10 minutes of the film, she seems content playing the muse to the inebriated but charming writer John Cheever (an amusing Gary Oldman). Finally, the young woman starts to tire of her shallow lifestyle, especially after her gay brother commits suicide. That dark moment feels wildly out of place here, but it’s a foreshadowing of some very unsavory matters that will start popping up more and more in this film. The mix of tones – the ugliness with all the glitz and glamour – plays uncomfortably, but most of what cinematographer Daria D’Antonio shoots glosses over any edginess. Even the suicide has grace and beauty to it, feeling almost like a perfume commercial.
Additionally confounding is how little actual sexuality or even nudity occurs throughout the story, giving all the film’s study in hedonism a splash of cold water. For a young woman experimenting with the libertine lifestyle, Parthenope is remarkably demure. Dalla Porta at least adds some cheekiness to the reactions of this often chaste and standoff-ish character. Writer/director Paolo Sorrentino doesn’t help the intellectual arguments he’s trying to make in his film with hoary questions put forth to her like “Are you aware of the disruption your beauty causes?” No wonder so much of Dalla Porta’s performance is her smirking.
When Sorrentino sends his character off to college late in the story, Parthenope starts to truly explore the intellectual and quickly establishes a clever rapport with her wisened old anthropology professor played by veteran actor Silvio Orlando. He’s the one man she respects and has a strictly platonic relationship with and their scenes crackle with some genuine chemistry and verve. It’s all a bit too late, but at least it deepens the picture.
Sorrentino has played with themes of beauty, art, and intellect before in films like REAL BEAUTY and YOUTH, and he certainly excels at visual tableaus, evocative scoring, and consuming sound design. Late in the game, he also introduces some goofiness, like a leering pope that could have walked right out of CONCLAVE, not to mention a 600 lb. manchild that even Fellini would’ve balked at using. It’s symbolism, sure, but it gets in the way of the loftier themes he was finally exploring.
Can I recommend the film? Not heartily, though Celeste Dalla Porta goes a long way toward making the film worth watching. She has grace, beauty, and wit, even when the proceedings around her do not. PARTHENOPE is a ravishing film, but too often it is also unappealing.
