‘Parthenope’ Review: Paolo Sorrentino’s Elegy on Life
Paolo Sorrentino looks at youth’s deepest regrets as time goes by in Parthenope, a study on how we we choose to spend the finite period we have on this planet.
Paolo Sorrentino frequently thinks about youth, not only in his aptly titled 2015 film ‘Youth’ but also in his own semi-autobiographical portrait, ‘The Hand of God’. They are at the forefront of his best motion pictures, with the protagonists he depicts, both young and old, attempting to grapple with their own lives in a world that continuously moves to eat the innocence of its youth and the pleasures they discover. Reaching the age of 50, he has now found a great sense of urgency in showcasing how the young waste their time and experience profound regret when they’re forced to reckon with themselves as they become older, wondering if the finite time they spent on this Earth was genuinely worth it.
It’s not a new or groundbreaking topic to tackle in movies, as just last week, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy asked the same questions about its now-aging protagonist forced to reflect on the life she had with her late husband and friends who are all growing frailer in a world that’s suddenly ignoring them. However, what makes Sorrentino stand apart from the pack of filmmakers (and movies) discussing the same subject is how he conveys the strongest emotions through the visual – and allegorical – language he develops (and refines) with each subsequent effort. It doesn’t matter if The Great Beauty and Youth tread the same themes when their outlook on youth and life vastly differs. As he ages, he’s found more answers that give him a different perspective on this world than he had just a few years ago when he had made The Hand of God.
For the bulk of his latest motion picture, Parthenope, one wonders exactly what he wants to talk about when tracking the life of its titular character (played by Celeste Dalla Porta), who bears the name of what Naples was once known as. We follow her through her tribulations as an impossibly beautiful woman with big aspirations that defy the societal norms expected by women in Italy during the 1960s and eventually the 1970s.
With a romantic fling here and there, a meeting with her writing idol, John Cheever (Gary Oldman), being quasi-forced to take up acting classes, or studying anthropology with her misunderstood professor Devoto Marotta (Silvio Orlando), her life seems full of excitement and surprises. These moments are wondrously visualized by cinematographer Daria D’Antonio, who sumptuously captures the jaw-dropping beauty of the Naples seascape with a different lens than in Sorrentino’s previous film, which seemed much more intimate in scale than the grandiose full shots of its vast open sea, and artful buildings.
As visually enthralling and enveloping as Sorrentino's (and D’Antonio’s) compositions remain, especially when viewed on the big screen, and as intoxicating as Dalla Porta’s breakout turn as Parthenope may be, it felt challenging to latch onto her fragmented journey, which moves from one place to the next without a cohesive whole to support its permutations. Sorrentino’s seductive, almost hypnotizing lens through which he captures Parthenope’s erotic discoveries is immediately supplanted when personal tragedy strikes her – and, by extension, her family. The abrupt tonal shift, a familiar hallmark of Sorrentino’s oeuvre, feels discombobulating and out of place with the lush, almost commercial-like aesthetic he gives to his movie from the moment it begins (the Saint Laurent Productions logo certainly explains why it looks more glossy than his previous efforts).
Juggling erotic drama, coming-of-age comedy, Italian melodrama, and Fellini-esque fantastical meditations on the anthropological nature of life itself, Sorrentino seems like he’s throwing everything at a wall to see what sticks. Some of it works remarkably well, such as scenes where Parthenope spends time with Cheever, an alcoholic who tries to drown his homosexuality by drinking to forget his existence, are of a dramatic high point. Oldman, in particular, makes the most out of his limited screen time as a writer who uses his personal struggles to fuel the sheets of paper he carefully hangs in his hotel room. However, he refuses to engage further with Parthenope, as he fears that spending more time with her will rob the youth and innocence she carries through her magnifying beauty. He says, “I don’t want to steal one minute of your youth from you,” while walking at night, isolated from the rest of the world, refusing to come to terms with who he is and how people, like Parthenope, perceive him.
The nature of anthropology scenes with Marotta is of equal measure to the time Sorrentino spends with Cheever. It does, however, end in the most baffling “narrative swing” (if we can call it that, it’s more of an anti-swing) that could potentially make or break your appreciation of the 137 minutes you spent with Parthenope. Yet, what comes before challenges the protagonist’s relationship with life itself and opens her up to a way of “seeing” that she had never realized existed before.
The apparently stern Professor Marotta ends up being the most charming and vulnerable individual in the entire film, whose way of viewing the world is shaped by his special (understatement of the year) relationship with his son. And no one, no matter how acclimated you may be with magical realism or otherworldly tales, is prepared for the scene where Marotta takes Parthenope to meet his son. Even I, a staunch defender of Sorrentino’s work ever since Il Divo, was utterly blindsided by such a shift in atmosphere – the closest the filmmaker may get to pure surrealism, which he teetered on throughout the picture but never fully delved into up until that pivotal point, where your tolerance for kooky stuff could very well be tested to pure impatience.
It also doesn’t help that in its second half, the film begins to meander with frivolous subplots that involve Parthenope having a one-night stand with Roberto Criscuolo (Marlon Joubert) or an on-the-nose section where she gets a prime seat for the miracle of San Gennaro with a Bishop (Peppe Lanzetta) whose carnal desires for the protagonist liquifies the dissolved blood of the saint. Sorrentino is no stranger to flipping religious imagery to its head (see The Young Pope and its sequel series, The New Pope), but this entire overlong segment felt tacky, even for him. Of course, one can see the metaphor Sorrentino wants to give to its titular character, but it almost feels as if he’s indulging himself in his worst directorial tendencies rather than actively having something to say on how the Catholic Church (and, by extension, the Vatican) took advantage of the young to abuse them, psychologically, and, in many cases, sexually.
One can think that Sorrentino has nothing to say up until the movie opens itself up in a shockingly tragic way during its final segment, with an aging protagonist (now played by Stefania Sandrelli), on the day of her retirement, reflecting on her youth and the time she pitifully wasted in romantic escapades and a fractured familial relationship with her parents she never fixed. Her most significant regrets are now visually exposed through a montage elevated through Riccardo Cocciante’s “Era già tutto previsto,” which also contrasts her contemplation as a retiree with the biggest joys and wonders of her youth. Looking directly at the camera, she says, “L'amore per provare a sopravvivere è stato un fallimento.” (Love, to try and help us survive, is a failure), after experiencing flashes of her past that reinterpreted her most romantic moments as cries for help and acts of loneliness that are of equal pain than the isolation Cheever suffers.
When that occurred, it was as if I was reading the entirety of Sorrentino’s film wrong. His thesis has never been more straightforward than it is now until he cuts back to Dalla Porta’s Parthenope to add a word to Sandrelli’s iteration of the character that changes what her older version wanted to state. Making us think from the very last scene, a true celebration of Napoli’s beauty as much as he showcases its ugliness and depravity, Sorrentino doesn’t leave the screen with easy answers on the anthropological nature of life and youth. It’s a complex (and subjective) notion that will constantly change as we grow older and eventually meet our end. The more hopeful and beautiful Parthenope had her entire life ahead of her when she reflected upon love as a means of human survival. The older version no longer has that hope, having now retired and forced to contemplate about who she was now, with nothing to show for it.
What does it all mean? Who knows, that’s the beauty (and complexity) of life and of Sorrentino’s work, who now urges younger viewers never to waste their time to hope they will not end up regretful like his protagonist, and perhaps himself, now do. With Parthenope’s final sentence, he instills in us the hope that it’s more than acceptable to misunderstand our place in this society, provided we don’t sit and do nothing for too long because everything we have can be over in an instant. Or maybe not.