Paolo Sorrentino’s new film fails to surprise. The director, ever-obsessed with beauty and youth, delivers yet another ode to his beloved idea of la grande belezza, but the reality of a woman continues to elude him.
A review by Iliana Tsachpini
In Greek mythology, Parthenope was one of the sirens: creatures whose irresistible song lured men into their deaths. It was nearly impossible to survive their call; but one day someone did — Odysseus — and Parthenope threw herself into the sea in despair. Her body washed ashore on what would become modern-day Naples. That’s where Sorrentino’s Parthenope is born: into the sea, in 1950.
Played by newcomer Celeste Dalla Porta, Parthenope is the daughter of a prosperous family living in a beautiful villa by the sea. From very early on, she alters the course of her family’s life and that of everyone who crosses her path. The male fantasy embodied, she is also curious and intellectually driven. “I don’t know anything, but I love everything” she says during her anthropology exam, which she naturally passes with 30 out of 30 points, cum laude. But it’s not just academia where she excels; every man seems to be desperate to know what goes on in her head at all times. “What are you thinking about?” asks Sandrino (Dario Aito), the housekeeper’s son, who spends the first 18 years of his life madly in love with her. And even her doomed brother, Raimondo (Daniele Rienzo), falls under the siren’s spell. When it comes to Parthenope, a blood bond does not guarantee immunity from the inscrutable song of beauty.
The only man who refuses her irresistible advances is the “alcoholic, depressed, marvelous” and, of course, closeted author John Cheever (Gary Oldman). Above all, he refuses Parthenope because he doesn’t want to waste even a single minute of her youth on himself. They bond nonetheless: Parthenope is living her coming-of-age summer, and Cheever is the only man she’s ever met who doesn’t see her solely through the lens of her beauty. His character delivers a series of poetic lines that flirt with abstraction — “Beauty is like war, it opens doors” — and serve as a quiet reminder of Parthenope’s own fleeting youth and beauty.
Sorrentino’s film is divided into decades. As these pass, we witness a mixture of the director’s intimate and at times conflicted reflections on his hometown, Naples, that presumably resonate more with him than with the average viewer. But, more than anything, we are offered countless reminders of the ephemerality of beauty. Through her life’s journey, Parthenope encounters women who embody the burden of aging in a world obsessed with youth: the acting teacher Flora Malva (Isabella Ferrari) who refuses to show her face because of botched plastic surgeries and confesses that she hasn’t been kissed in 20 years; and later on, the Neapolitan diva Greta Cool (Louisa Ranieri), who only comes back to Naples to scorn the people still living there with a memorable speech. She, too, is suffering the loss of her beauty — her luminous hair pulled back to reveal a wig, leaving only sparse strands on her scalp.
In these sequences, Sorrentino appears almost desperate to reinforce the idea that a woman’s power and desirability are tied solely to her youth, in a rather axiomatic way. In La Grande Belezza (2013), we also follow a protagonist whose life drives the plot, only this time, the protagonist is male. And unlike Parthenope, he is not burdened by beauty, but is free to observe it, enjoy it, philosophize about it. By contrast, Parthenope is almost silenced in this film, as if muteness could enhance her beauty by lending it an added layer of mystery. What we get is a hollow, pseudo-intellectual protagonist, while Dalla Porta’s acting abilities are being wasted in photogenic close-ups and well-rehearsed glances that strive for enigma but never quite land.
Parthenope fell short of expectations, delivering only a dull repetition of Sorrentino’s motives of beauty, youth and the city of Naples. It is astonishing how, in 2025, films like this blatantly showcase gendered standards without a hint of apparent social criticism. At the end, it seems that Parthenope is only free when the curse of her beauty is lifted – in her old age, when no one is asking her what she’s thinking about.
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