Parthenope: When Paolo Sorrentino makes his contempt (critic)
The Italian explores the power of beauty through the life of a Neapolitan. A controversial but ambitious film, which transcends simple aesthetic contemplation.
Paolo Sorrentino has just signed his Contempt. Just that. On paper, the filmmaker tells the life of Parthenopeyoung Neapolitan with grace and dazzling youth, who will try to understand the power of his charm (in every sense of the word). Some have found it stunning, others ugly. In Cannes, in particular, where he came back in competition, the Italian took the wall of criticism. He was accused of getting out of any social and political context. Or not to have understood the #MeToo momentum which makes that the cinema can no longer be only the “fact of having pretty things do to pretty girls”. It’s fair, but it is also refusing to see that the film goes far beyond.
Sorrentinian art condensed, Parthenope Is both an existential fable (what is the price of beauty? Is it a curse or a power? And what does it reveal by men?), A heartbreaking melo, a round of characters more intriguing than the others and a love letter in Naples and in the cinema. It is basically a world film, a trip – an odyssey – temporal which synthesizes the two sides of the artist’s cinema. The quasi -civilizational group portrait and the intimate and metaphysical questions of a man thirsty for absolute. Incidentally, the film has the two most beautiful scenes seen at the start of the year: the appearance of the main character (embodied by Celeste Dalla Porta) and a literally overwhelming suicide sequence.
From Paolo Sorrentino with Celeste Dalla Porta, Gary Oldman, Stefania Sandrelli… Duration 2h16. Released March 12, 2025
