Much of Paolo Sorrentino’s 11th feature is an ode to Naples too many. Following his tremendous Maradona-themed roman a clef The Hand of God, the sluggish Parthenope casts the director’s native Napoli – we think – as a beautiful, capricious woman in a bikini. And sometimes not even a bikini.
Celeste Dalla Porta’s mythologically named title character is meaningfully born in the waters of Posillipo – where her siren namesake lured sailors to their doom – in 1950. Her early years are dominated by a strange throuple between her dishy housekeeper’s son and incestuously obsessed brother.
Disjointed episodes introduce the American author John Cheever (Gary Oldman), a follically challenged variant of Sophia Loren, and the randy cardinal (Peppe Lanzetta) who presides over the miraculous liquefaction of the blood of Napoli’s patron saint, San Gennaro.
Even an intellectual relationship – well, a bunch of pithy quips – with her university professor (Silvio Orlando) fails to convince us she is more substantial than a topless version of a manic pixie dream girl: a gliding object for the chaps to ogle and bounce off.
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“What’s your favourite part of a woman’s body?” Parthenope asks Lanzetta’s prelate during an absurd and pointedly blasphemous seduction sequence: “Her back. The rest is pornography.”
The enigmatic title character is at the centre of every plodding scene, yet Dalla Porta is given scandalously little to do in Sorrentino’s most leering film since Lora, his Berlusconi biopic. She covers her ears and ducks out of Italy’s briefly glimpsed Years of Lead; she encounters a surreal giant baby and simply keeps gliding.
For all these frustrations the Italian auteur crafts several indelible moments. Parthenope meets a charming mobster (Marlon Joubert) who leads her through the slums of Naples in scenes that recall James Joyce’s depictions of Monto. She witnesses a wild live sex show during which the young scions of two rival Camorra families attempt to conceive a child.
These picaresque and picturesque adventures fail to coalesce into a movie. But it’s impossible to argue with Daria D’Antonio’s ravishing cinematography and an unexpectedly moving coda featuring Stefania Sandrelli as an older Parthenope.
