Review: PARTHENOPE

 by Rob DiCristino

“Beauty is like war. It opens doors.”

In The Odyssey — soon to be a major motion picture from Christopher Nolan — the hero Odysseus encounters three beautiful sirens whose enchanting songs spell doom for any travelers who hear them. Odysseus, not trusting himself to resist temptation, ties himself to the mast of his ship and plugs his crews’ ears with wax so that they will not be swayed from their mission. Upon the sirens’ defeat, one of them, Parthenope, drowns herself off the shores of what is now Naples, Italy. Perhaps she couldn’t bear the disgrace, the implication that her beauty was no longer powerful enough to entice her prey. What does that beauty mean, anyway? Does it have a purpose (aside from nautical entrapment)? Does it have a shelf life? How do we measure it, bottle it, keep it fresh? Is that beauty exclusive to youth and innocence? Do we, as Cheever wrote, waste the beauty of our youths on clothes and jobs and dishwasher maintenance in adulthood? In its best movements, Italian writer/director Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope dissects this connection between youth and beauty. His conclusions, however, are hardly conclusive at all.

We begin in 1950s Naples, where a new Parthenope is born to a wealthy family of shipping magnates just off the very same coastline where her mythical namesake earned her infamy. By the late seventies, a teenage Parthenope (Celeste Dalla Porta) has become a siren in her own right: Her beauty, effortless and immaculate, captures the imagination of everyone from the housekeeper’s son (Dario Aita, whose Sandrino spends most of the film pining from the margins), to her father’s middle-aged employer (Alfonso Santagata). Even her older brother Raimondo (Daniele Rienzo) is nursing urges he can’t seem to squash, a troubling conflict that will prove tragic in the film’s later acts. All the while, Parthenope herself remains delightfully aloof, encouraging a dozen playful seductions — including a businessman who spots her from a helicopter and refuses to land until she agrees to a ride — but rarely deigning to bore herself with consummation. “Desire is a mystery, and sex is its funeral,” she quoth Cheever, and our girl is far too beautiful for funerals.

Like many young people who don’t understand the freedom that beauty affords them, however, Parthenope becomes principally concerned with complicating her life, which leads her to the lecture hall of anthropology professor Devoto Marotta (Silvio Orlando, playing the crusty old bastard I’ve basically got a 50/50 shot of aging into). Like all good teachers, Marotta is unimpressed by Parthenope’s ability to regurgitate names and theories and instead challenges her to explore the true meaning behind their work: What is anthropology? What does it mean to understand humanity? What questions haven’t been asked? What corners haven’t been explored? To solve these mysteries, Parthenope will cross paths with an aging actress (Luisa Rainieri), a pair of mob families hosting a public “Great Fusion” between their respective son and daughter — it’s exactly what you think it is — a horny priest who promises to reveal the Miracle of San Gennaro, and, as you might have guessed, the inscrutable John Cheever himself (Gary Oldman), drowning in liquor and his trademark ennui.

For all its intellectual pontification, however, Parthenope is about as leisurely-paced and minimally-plotted as movies come, more an invitation to whimsy than a serious character study. Sorrentino does have a true movie star in Celeste Dalla Porta, though, a muse whose beauty barely profits from any of her director’s generous blocking or adoring lighting schemes. At the risk of sounding indelicate, Dalla Porta is an ethereal, other-worldly screen presence, a vessel so impenetrably perfect that nearly every male character — and most of the female characters — are forced to remark on the disruptive nature of her very existence. Sorrentino lavishes her in vivid close-ups, leaving almost nothing to our imaginations in bikini scenes and, in more than a few sequences, next to no room in the frame for anyone else. Appropriate as it might be for a film that explores the transient nature of beauty to document its title character’s flawlessness this extensively, though, Sorrentino seems to do it with a note of bitterness, telegraphing — unintentionally or not — his own frustration with that transience.

And it’s through that lens of frustration that Parthenope really stumbles. While fawning so extensively over a creature of such exquisite, unobtainable beauty, Sorrentino fails to extend her any real depth besides bemused smiles and quippy one-liners (“You always have a clever comeback,” she’s told over and over again), as if in imitation of the enigmatic, unsolvable women from his own romantic past. And while Parthenope’s odyssey may take her from childhood to academia to the underworld to celebrity to the very face of God, the film’s only attempt at catharsis is a surreal penultimate scene that fails to illuminate anything significant about that life or that journey. Perhaps, as Professor Marotta insists, real anthropology is “seeing,” and it’s on each of us to draw our own conclusions about how those sights should be interpreted. Or more likely, Sorrentino — whose script also tellingly laments the decay of Naples itself — is simply a conflicted filmmaker lashing out against his own mortality, against his own lost youth and fading beauty. If that’s the case, then I have only this to say in response: Get in line, buddy.

Parthenope is in wide release on February 21st.