Celeste Dalla Porta gives a dynamic performance in the captivating Neapolitan drama from the director of “The Great Beauty.”
“Parthenope,” a decades-spanning drama about a young woman born in Naples (the hometown of screenwriter-director Paolo Sorrentino), is an exquisite treatise on cinematic beauty. Chronicling her birth, her teenage summers, and the years she spends adrift as a young adult, the film is a heady reflection on the way people and places see each other — and the way they see themselves.
Director: Paolo Sorrentino
Writer: Paolo Sorrentino
Stars: Dario Aita, Antonino Annina, Margherita Aresti
Celeste Dalla Porta gives a captivating performance as the film’s title character, a woman of such breathtaking beauty that people stop and stare. Her allure is practically unsettling — an idea the camera embodies by presenting her through pristine, symmetrical vistas that appear suddenly, as if demanding that the editing skip over their dramatic connective tissue. After all, she is named after the founder of Naples and one of the six sirens of green mythology, but Sorrentino remains constantly aware of the lascivious idealism he applies to Parthenope. As young lovers and strangers gaze at her body, the frame remains transfixed by her expression, which initially has the naive charm of a young muse or a film debutante who exists first and foremost for the camera’s gaze.
Her beauty, a small but striking character played by Gary Oldman tells her, will open doors and spark wars, and neither Della Porta nor Sorrentino shy away from presenting Parthenope as a carefree seductress reveling in her youth. But she wants something more and is afraid of being perceived as empty (as the camera perceives her at the beginning), which drives her to pursue an academic career in anthropology under the tutelage of a grumpy professor, Devoto Marotta (Silvio Orlando), one of the only men who seems to tell her the truth, albeit shrouded in riddles.
As these notions of societal expectation (born of an exacerbated cinematic fetishism akin to Perfume ads) clash with her own desires, Della Porta’s performance appropriately evolves. Though she never answers the question of what exactly lies behind the character’s eyes (something she seems to ask herself at every turn), she adds layer upon layer to the existing mystery of who Parthenope is and what she wants, starting with a smile that extends only from her mouth, in the first scenes, to one we can recognize in the creases around her eyes.
Her story is told also through changing hairstyles (complemented by Carlo Poggioli’s precise and emotional costume choices), which not only age Parthenope from her teens to her 30s, but set the stage for the time in her life she finds herself in, between her conflicting desires for play, domestic satisfaction, professional success, etc. Every department is working at full capacity to ensure Parthenope’s evolution, until she finally seizes upon the power of her own charm in a moment of startling, sacrilegious release.
Along the way, a family tragedy leaves her emotionally adrift, and as she heads toward becoming a big-screen star, her conversations with older actresses who are considered old-fashioned (due to age, botched cosmetic surgeries, and hair loss) illuminate the nature of her own desires, romantic, academic, and otherwise. Each scene plays out dreamlike despite being tethered to reality, thanks in large part to Lele Marchitelli’s operatic score and the Neapolitan setting, whose more traditionally (and even non-traditionally) beautiful men and women appear and disappear from Parthenope’s story.
These detours, as Parthenope wanders the city streets, take the form of various beautiful and disturbing rituals, whether literal rituals of celebration or acts of lust and emotional intimacy, or something more perverse (in one case, a sex scene that is as “plot-y” as it gets, which the film flatly rejects). All of this culminates in a surreal sequence that, in any other film, might tap into fear and pity a little too much. But all of this is ultimately subverted by Sorrentino’s refashioning of everything that beauty entails, in a film that acknowledges and recognizes how the movie camera, over the last century, has cemented limiting notions of what we see and what images of women entail.
Watch Parthenope 2025 Movie Trailer
“Parthenope” is a film that resonates with the hum of nostalgia, recapturing the sense of youthful, summery freedom while refusing to shy away from the uncertainties of young adulthood. But it is not a simple coming-of-age story; rather, it is a film about recovery.
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