Paolo Sorrentino loves boobs. Ample, voluptuous, and statuesque bosoms pepper many a Sorrentino film. The man knows how to frame breasts, either in pairs or hanging solo. His costume designers augment them perfectly. Beautiful gowns offer the right support with plunging necklines at the front and scintillating drapery on the sides. And his cinematographers and gaffers know how to make soft lighting accentuate curves from all angles: you’ve never seen sideboob like you have in a Sorrentino movie. If Sorrentino’s filmography is the biggest ode to bosoms since, well, Seth MacFarlane’s oft-maligned “We Saw Your Boobs” song at the Oscars, then Parthenope is his legacy. It’s a wonder that he hasn’t done a film with Kate Winslet.
For all the appreciation of women’s upper assets, though, Sorrentino looks to be the biggest boob of all. Even a hard-core fan of the Oscar winning director of The Great Beauty, Youth (my #1 of 2015), and The Hand of God (top 10 of 2021) may leave Parthenope disappointed. The boobs are great, yes—they’re real and they’re spectacular—but Sorrentino shows little interest in the soul beneath them.
It’s disappointing that Sorrentino nip-slips, since Parthenope marks a departure from his work by offering a female protagonist. The film mirrors the episodic and Fellini-seque abstraction of his previous narratives, but with a young woman. Sorrentino follows the titular character from her birth in Naples through her lifetime relishing the sun-soaked pleasures of the countryside. Men love Parthenope and she loves men.
As Parthenope (newcomer Celeste Dalla Porta) comes of age like a sun-kissed goddess, she becomes an object of desire for every man in town. Even her brother, Raimondo (Daniele Rienzo) gets weak-kneed just looking at her. He’s equally statuesque, but even when he scores with beautiful well-endowed women at the club, he only has eyes for Parthenope. Ick.
Brother and sister share an intimate relationship—well, not that intimate, seemingly to mutual disappointment. Come hither glances, far-too close dances, and afternoons spent lounging in the summer heat in that’s-how-it-is-in-their-family proximity ensure that their formative years are super-charged with hormones. As Daniele admires Parthenope as she poses, sideboob radiating golden sunlight off her glistening skin, he pines for what he can’t have. And his sister grows into a true maneater.
Sorrentino, to his credit, tries to balance boobs with brains while fashioning Parthenope into something more than a mythical object of desire. The film follows her to school where she impresses her professors by being far more than a pretty face. Outside the lecture halls, though, she’s not really keen to be a fully-dimensional person. The legend of Parthenope sees the Greek siren plunge into the sea when Odysseus recognizes her charms, but this young women struggles to find her voice.
Even Parthenope’s run-in with beloved author John Cheever (Gary Oldman) does little to engage a meeting of the minds. Parthenope really just scoops some lunch with the writer to delay the invitations of an admirer in the sky who seems to be trailing her in his helicopter. He’s the one with the smarts to call it off. Oldman’s performance proves a highlight, but Cheever underscores the filmmaker’s comfort in letting men speak for women.
Napoli’s resident tease can only fend off suitors for so long, and Parthenope’s idyllic summer nights take a tragic turn. But Sorrentino juggles the sacred and the profane, as he often does. Parthenope’s homage to Rochelle, Rochelle intersects with horny Cardinals and a public witnessing of a marriage consummation. These strange trysts, viewed voyeuristically through Daria D’antonio’s detached, if truly gorgeous cinematography, offer little evidence that they’re moments of personal growth. Every frame could be a high-end brassiere ad.
Pivotal imagery and sumptuously symbolic imagery can be a great marker for Sorrentino’s visual fancy. Remember those arresting still images from The Hand of God—wayward bosom included—that signposted a filmmaker’s maturing eye? He doesn’t afford Parthenope the same introspectiveness. Moreover, he just can’t write a female character who can sustain a feature.
Celeste Dalla Porta has terrific screen presence, but Parthenope’s more interested in her curves than her being. Parthenope marks the leeriest, male-gaziest film in Sorrentino’s filmography. The Italian auteur has always had an eye for beauty without denying his appreciation of female form. But his previous films have a way of affording women agency and dimensions, if only because he gives them showstopper supporting roles that offer men reality checks. (See Jane Fonda’s Oscar worthy turn in Youth.) With Parthenope, however, he seems to have doubled down on every criticism of his work as empty sexism. His often-maligned TIFF Bulgari ad proves a better watch.
