Parthenope (2024)

Paolo Sorrentino's Parthenope arrives draped in the usual finery: Naples as a sun-bleached stage, a heroine of impossible symmetry, and a soundtrack of sighs. Celeste Dalla Porta plays the title figure from her 1950 birth in the sea through six decades of being looked at. The camera does the looking. Sorrentino has said his subject is neither siren nor myth, which is a tidy way of saying she is a surface he finds pleasing to photograph. Critics noticed. The New York Times observed that he is more interested in deifying her than in humanizing her, and that the film shows no interest in political correctness. Fair enough. This is a portrait, not an argument.

On the matter of social consciousness, the ledger comes up thin. The cast is white Italian, with Gary Oldman dropped in as a visiting novelist, and no discernible impulse toward representational breadth. Race never surfaces as a concern in this provincial chronicle of class and appetite. LGBTQ themes are absent entirely; the desire on display is heterosexual and, in the brother's case, incestuous. Climate does not enter the frame. Money, the Camorra, and an affluent family drift past as atmosphere, never as targets of a systematic critique of wealth. Body positivity is not merely unaddressed but inverted: the film runs on its star's idealized beauty as its principal currency.

Where the film does lecture, it lectures about anthropology, miracles, suicide and art, in conversations that critics found bombastic. A brief appearance by a professor's severely disabled son supplies a flicker of pathos, though the film frames it as human tragedy, not as advocacy. The result is immaculate, self-regarding, and largely apolitical in the contemporary sense. Sorrentino has made an advertisement for beauty that runs two hours and sixteen minutes. It is a handsome thing to sit through, and it says almost nothing about the world it depicts.