Parthenope

Paolo Sorrentino's Parthenope opened in competition at Cannes 2024, another return to the festival for the director of the Oscar-winning The Great Beauty. It extends his long engagement with Naples as both setting and subject. He was born and raised there, he had already based The Hand of God (2021) on his own Neapolitan childhood, and this newer feature adds to that body of Naples films. The title is the name of the city's mythical siren.

Naples, 1950. A girl is born from the sea and named after the siren. Across decades she drifts through her beauty, her intellectual obsessions (anthropology above all) and her slow disappointments, watched all the while by men who cannot quite reach her. Celeste Dalla Porta plays Parthenope for most of the film's running time and Stefania Sandrelli plays her older self. Gary Oldman is an alcoholic American writer who passes briefly through her life, and Silvio Orlando is her university anthropology professor.

It is a character study and a portrait of Naples across the second half of the twentieth century, and it is also Sorrentino refining the visual style he has been working on throughout his career. Daria D'Antonio photographs the bay, the city's interiors and the wider geography around them. The reception followed the pattern of Sorrentino's recent work: close and serious engagement from Italian critics, and a more polarised response abroad.