Time was when European arthouse films were alternatives to more explicit fare for young men keen to catch a glimpse of breast. That time is not so far off in Parthenope, Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino’s second film in a row to be set in his native city of Naples following the Oscar-nominated . Lush, sensual, dripping with desire, this paean to Naples’ desperate beauty comes with a male gaze so intense and dazzling that one assumes no extra lighting was needed on set.
That gaze is directed squarely at the film’s titular protagonist, a Neapolitan beauty born in 1950 and named after a legendary siren whose romantic death is associated with the foundation of the Greek city that preceded modern-day Naples. Thereis no faulting the radiant performance of Celeste Dalla Porta in her feature debut. It’s the objectification of her character that’s the issue – plus Sorrentino’s trick, here indulged even more flagrantly than in of privileging flashy audio-visual tableaux over narrative coherence.
Enigmatic but sexy, independent-minded but available even to a louche and lewd ageing wreck of a bishop, Parthenope could be a metaphor for a city which seduces without ever giving up its soul, or she could be the incarnation of a shameless male fantasy. Audiences, which will be large in Italy and could be numerous elsewhere too, will make their own minds up while admiring the good-looking package – because for all its old-fashioned attitudes, is nothing if not cinematic. A 1950 .
