Parthenope

Paolo Sorrentino's Parthenope opened in competition at Cannes 2024 — Sorrentino's continuing return to the festival circuit after his Oscar-winning The Great Beauty. The film consolidated Sorrentino's continuing engagement with Naples as both setting and central subject; he had been born and raised there, had previously based The Hand of God (2021) on his autobiographical Naples childhood, and continued to develop his Neapolitan filmography across this newer feature. The title takes its name from the mythical siren of Naples herself.

Naples, 1950. A girl is born from the sea and named after the city's mythical siren. Across decades she drifts through her beauty, her intellectual obsessions (particularly her engagement with anthropology), and her slow disappointments — observed continuously by men who cannot quite reach her. Celeste Dalla Porta plays the central Parthenope across the largest portion of the film's runtime; Stefania Sandrelli plays the older Parthenope; Gary Oldman plays an alcoholic American writer who briefly enters her life; Silvio Orlando plays her university anthropology professor.

The film operates simultaneously as character study, broader-Naples-historical-cultural document across the second half of the twentieth century, and sustained Sorrentino visual-design exercise in the kind of register the director has been refining across his career. Daria D'Antonio's photography of Naples — the bay, the city's interior environments, the broader continuing geography — anchors a film whose reception was characteristic of Sorrentino's recent work: substantial Italian critical engagement, more polarised international reception.