Parthenope: the Naples that undresses itself naked, according to Paolo Sorrentino
The Italian director returns to Cannes with another ode to his city, where the portrait of its upper-class meets its most visceral folklore.
The only Italian running for the Palm d’Or at Cannes, Paolo Sorrentino returns to the Croisette on the exact same day, 21 May, on which twenty years earlier he presented Le conseguenze dell’amore, this time with Parthenope.
By 12.30 p.m., at the Grand Théâtre de Lumière, on the ending notes of the unmistakable Napoli ultras choir ‘un giorno all’improvviso m’innamorai di te’ (‘one day suddenly I fell in love with you’), the entire audience in the auditorium was on its feet cheering Paolo Sorrentino.
The cast include legendary Gary Oldman, Silvio Orlando, Dario Aita, Daniele Rienzo, 26-year-old Milanese Celeste Dalla Porta, niece of art photographer Ugo Mulas, and Stefania Sandrelli. Her name makes us travel back in time again, when the actress starred in the drama La terrazza (1980) by Ettore Scola, winning the Best Supporting Actress award here on the Croisette.
Scola, in fact, has always been a mentor and friend of Sorrentino, who on several occasions has voiced the director’s influence on his The Great Beauty. ‘Scola was the great link between melancholy and irony. We had a beautiful friendship. I always invited him to see my films before they came out, I wanted to know his opinion.’
And who knows what he would have thought of Parthenope, the very embodiment of the Greek myth of the siren, an allegory of freedom who bewitches and enchains men and women to herself with her voice (and wit). Those who cannot bear her song will be forced to throw themselves into the abyss.
Set in the 1950s, that of Parthenope (Celeste dalla Porta), is the story of a wealthy Neapolitan girl who grows up with the awareness of her charm and beauty, preferring the former to the latter, becoming the embodiment of the ability to ‘see’ and not to appear.
She loves words, prods us with the most obvious answers and leaves us hanging with the most difficult questions. As the time goes by, the years wear away on a terrace overlooking the sea between Posillipo and Capri, in a succession of summers of unconfessed tears and secret youthful love.
Sorrentino’s aesthetic power is fulfilled on screen and puzzles the spectator, with music mirroring such attitude. The director offers his Italian songbook, blending pop classics with folklore, with tracks by Riccardo Cocciante (‘Era già tutto previsto’), Gino Paoli ( ‘Che cosa c’è’) and by the singer-songwriter Valerio Piccolo from Caserta with his ‘E si’ arrivata pure tu’, the film’s only original composition.
The picture of Naples is quickly taken: the Neapolitan city is determined and listless, miraculous and fraudulent, sacred and profane.
The director undresses the city, lays its bare, like a female body. The protagonist herself invites us to watch it, voyeuristically: ‘and now let’s go and see Naples undress’.
Sorrentino seems to only apparently leave behind the working-class city of The Hand of God, to indulge in an analysis of the upper-class of Posillipo. Behind its seraphic and contemptuous calm it hides inner troubles, an allusion to the lesson of Scola and the left-wing intelligentsia he loved to portray; but also a broader ode to the popular culture of the Smorfia, of the city’s brothels, its masks and allegories, the rite of the miracle of San Gennaro and his blood that doesn’t melt. Or does it?
Opening image: Parthenope, frame from the film, 2024.