There’s much to appreciate in , ’s second consecutive bittersweet paean to his home city of Naples. At least for a while, before the too-muchness of it takes hold and the character at the center stops being intriguing and just becomes a siren with an air of mystery but too little evidence of all that’s supposedly going on behind it. While shimmered with the director’s memories of his youth, the deeply personal nature and intimacy of that film are drowned here by ostentation.
The craft aspects, as always, are exquisite and the visuals so lush and alive they threaten to jump off the screen. But this is a movie whose eponymous protagonist — her name is the one originally given to Naples by the Greeks in the 8th century BC — becomes more distant and unknowable the more time we spend with her. Unlike Toni Servillo’s similarly remote character in , whose palpable yearning drew us in, Parthenope becomes a gorgeous cipher.
That might also have had something to do with a male protagonist being less subject to the prurient aspects of Sorrentino’s gaze. The film gets off to an enthralling start and also concludes on a resonant note, when the eternally captivating Stefania Sandrelli steps in to play Parthenope in her 70s, returning to Naples after a long absence. The closing image — of her sighing as she rediscovers the fickle euphoria of enchantment while watching a truckload of celebratory soccer fans pass by — in a single instant returns the emotional interiority t.