Gary Oldman jumped at the chance to be in Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s new coming-of-age drama, “Parthenope,” even if it was just a small role, the Oscar-winning actor told Reuters. “I was in anyway. I didn’t care what it would have been either,” said Oldman on Wednesday at the Cannes Film Festival, where the competition film celebrated its premiere.
Oldman has a bit part as melancholic American novelist John Cheever. The title character, a long-haired beauty played by newcomer Celeste Dalla Porta, is inexplicably drawn to him on vacation. Parthenope enchants the men in her life, and the film follows her from her birth in the waters of the Bay of Naples to her last day before retiring as a professor of anthropology.
Sorrentino said his own life experience gave him the idea of following a character through various ages. “Being in my 50s, well, actually more, I was very fascinated with the idea of recounting the melancholies, sorrows, and hopes that revolve around the passing of time,” he said. “And so from there I came up with the idea of doing a long tale of a woman from when she was born until today,” he added.
Sorrentino noted that the heroine’s development also coincides with that of the city of Naples. “Parthenope, in the first part of the film, when she is young, coincides with the city, they are two mysteries,” said Sorrentino, a Cannes veteran who has brought seven films to compete for the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or. In th.