Review by Beatrice On 21-Sep-2024
Don’t you think that desire is a mystery, and sex its funeral?
1950, a young girl is being born, delivered into the water of the sea: for the event, a 17th-century carriage is brought to serve as a cradle.
One of the most beautiful houses on the water in Naples is where the new Venus/siren/mythological creature will carve out her space of beauty and wisdom.
New eyes gaze upon a bourgeois and poor Naples/Parthenope, opulent and miserable, cultured and enchanted, which DOES NOT DISTINGUISH THE IRRELEVANT FROM THE DECISIVE.
A city that watches and watches itself through the ethereal and intangible beauty of a free and beloved woman, deeply desired by her brother Raimondo and not just him.
Their youth, so privileged and yet unhappy, is shattered by encounters where the SILENCE OF THE RICH IS MYSTERY AND THAT OF THE POOR FAILURE.
1973, the funeral and the cholera on Naples' waterfront.
Parthenope attends the Faculty of Anthropology and wants to know how Professor Marotta defines her.
Given her beauty and desirability, she is advised to become an actress, but she, who doesn’t answer questions but responds with firm determination, isn’t interested in that path.
The parody of a great Neapolitan actress, with a monologue about Naples and Neapolitans, rather severe and irreverent, portrays an image of the city so praised yet always betrayed.
Parthenope, surrounded by vain individuals, arrogant, desiring, adoring, is mostly attracted to the company of intellectuals like John Cheever, with whom she would gladly spend time if he weren’t interested in other bodies.
Parthenope grows, wanders, observes, listens, studies as a careful anthropologist, all the while continuing to wonder what anthropology really is.
She doesn’t miss anything, not even a tour of the Spanish quarters with the local mobster: among the rich, unhappy humanity and the poor who lack the tools to live.
While she proposes to Professor Marotta a thesis on the anthropological reason for suicide, he counters with the cultural roots of miracles.
In light of these themes, she frequents the archbishop who oversees the miracle of San Gennaro, a parody of Crescenzio Sepe, who dyes his hair in church; she points out that there’s no air in the cathedral, and he replies: it’s Catholicism!
The miracle doesn’t happen, the blood doesn’t liquefy, the stillness coagulates.
Anthropology is SEEING, Marotta finally declares: when you’re young, you have other priorities—living, desiring, dreaming, moving through the world, learning—and then, little by little, these things fade, and vision becomes a kind of survival tool.
If youth is a moment of false happiness, the woman remains a mysterious, unknowable object.
Beauty, mystery, freedom: if anthropology is seeing, Parthenope’s experience is an anthropological one.
La Grande Bellezza portrayed Rome and Romans, but not only them; Parthenope portrays Neapolitans and Naples, but not only them.
An unresolved, incomplete humanity roams a fragmented world, where there’s too much space to traverse and too much time to live.
Marotta’s son is made of water and salt, a sort of Neptune who laughs peacefully while watching TV.
Technology doesn’t exist; in youth, everything has yet to happen, but perhaps that’s not the case, because everything happens in an instant.
The only power of beauty is to fuel desire, to stretch, procrastinate, delay, divide, fragment… parcel out the headless enjoyment of the moment.
Parthenope is contamination and virginity, mixture and separation, contact and detachment; she’s a stranger in her own city, alien to herself.
Faced with the violent and vulgar initiation/fusion of Camorra Naples, she loses and finds herself to pinpoint the right distance; life is the only possible compromise.
Palpable unhappiness, tangible melancholy:
An epic tale about the length of life: for various reasons, I thought it more appropriate and precise to have it unfold through a woman, because in the era of the length of life, the theme of passing time is contained, which doesn’t mean nostalgia and melancholy, though this connects us all. At the moment when we are fortunate enough to live long enough, we are all destined to love, to suffer, to disappoint and be disappointed; we are all heroic in the face of the length of life, of the passage of time and how it flows and how it changes us. It seemed to me that women approach life’s milestones with greater awareness and responsibility, unlike men, who are often plagued by infantilism. In this sense, I’ve felt very feminine. When I speak of life’s milestones and the mood swings tied to age, I’m much more in tune with women than with men, who tend to minimize, pretending the problem doesn’t exist. The day this story was born was because I was drunk enough to make resolutions for the future.
A film of questions without answers, where the pact is to never judge, to linger on the gaze, to learn to see, even if EVERYTHING WAS ALREADY FORESEEN.
Even if it’s the mystery that gives beauty to freedom, or freedom to beauty.
Parthenope is Naples, and Naples is a microcosm of the human, with all its contradictions, aesthetic, ethical, existential: Naples always promises you an eternal vacation and always makes you live on the outside.
It’s love and betrayal, spirituality and farce, ecstasy and indifference.
Parthenope as a woman is the ability to linger, to pause, to take time, to see. She is the anthropology in action of the female gaze on the all-too-human.
But maybe that’s not the case, and God hates the sea…
Sorrentino confirms his flair for artistically representing the depth of the surface.
A chaotic and baroque surface, yet seductive and hypnotic, that wouldn’t need a story because it’s already a plot, fabric, weave, subject, script.
An oblique fluidity that turns the image into an extension of the gaze, a question mark that interferes with analogies, differences, stereotypes, and challenges interactions.
A cinema of excess that portrays excess, to decorate a surface built on depth, layered over it, thickened by the sedimentation of intentions and meanings.
A superficiality that’s never superficial, always nuanced, though apparently chaotic and vaguely undefined.
A disturbing enchantment.
21-Sep-2024 by Beatrice
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