Parthenope

Honestly it could easily have been longer (one more strange symbolic journey for the title character before the finale could have tied this all together nicely) as Sorrentino really makes this movie so beguiling, mysterious, and beautiful that you can let yourself get swept away by it all.

Beautiful but BORING ! A sea of poignant pauses ! Enough ! I could not watch the last hour.

The movie made me cry. Maybe because Im from naples. But the cinematography was stunning.

It's just so ssslllloooowwwww. Gary Oldman is much more animated in Slow Horses. It's very Italian. If there is a beautiful girl, their whole world stops. and this movie is like one long stop. They all smoke, I dont know who will die first, them or the viewer.

How is that Gary Oldman’s character is the one I desperately needed the subtitles for. I saw a review calling this basically a perfume ad, and they’re not wrong. Beautiful woman, stunning cinematography, colors so vivid... but way sadder and moodier than any commercial. The movie’s mostly boring and suffers from a weak narrative. You catch glimpses of some artistic ambition and philosophical musings, but the script can’t quite commit or hold it together. It ends up feeling vapid, with hardly any real character development beyond surface-level looks. Maybe that’s the point in a meta way, but kind of lame if it is. The recurring “What are you thinking?” theme where everyone’s obsessed with the great beauty’s mind is trying for something but the filmmaker never lets us in on what she's thinking, which feels lazy. I’m guessing it’s supposed to be some meta mirror -- like as an audience we're all asking the same question as the characters ask of her, but it just leaves her stranded with no real layers. It doesn't do the character or film any favors by leaving the question unanswered. We are meant to see her as intellectual and more than just her looks but are given little to no evidence of her internal experience in the film. It's a catch-22 of sorts. One of the final scenes tries to contrast beauty with something considered culturally grotesque, but it’s way too on the nose and feels tacked on. Are we supposed to believe she now sheds all superficialities and can faithfully pursue anthropology. Is this weird scene even related to her arc? It's shallow character development masquerading as depth and significance. But what do I know... I'm writing all of this so maybe it made me think and that's the point? The score was pretty good at least.

Truth is I only chose this to see how far I'd get before I switch off but the fact that I ended up watching all 2h17m of it is testament to the fact that there's something inexplicably charming and/or eye-catching here. An episodic character study of Celeste Dalla Porta's titular Parthenope who's constantly entertaining intentionally eccentric people around her, her life is depicted, as per any Paolo Sorrentino film, in a gorgeously composed and sumptuously shot manner, except it's also constantly genre-switching. It begins as a homage to Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers, then jumps into an Almodovarian camp comedy. Gary Oldman pops up as real life short story writer John Cheever (and why not?) while Silvio Orlando's anthropological professor Marotta could well be Paul Giamatti's character in The Holdovers if only he's also hiding a giant translucent baby in his house. Similar to his more down-to-earth and autobiographical The Hand of God, it's another love letter to his beloved Naples but this time, Sorrentino has decided to be as frivolous and maximalist as he possibly can, throwing things into the mix haphazardly, be it mafia families joining forces in the form of a couple of young nubile lovers or a gross and naked cardinal performing miracles to seduce Parthenope. It's entirely ludicrous and ridiculous and I've no idea what any of this means but I can never say I was bored.

Good performances but the story is weak

Vapid and pretentious, Sorrentino disappoints with a story so tonally off, with characters so wishy-washy and overall deeply unlikeable. Celeste Dalla Porta shines, however, in a film that otherwise fails to capture the hearts of it's audience.

Movies that promote woman with multiple men is whats failing our culture, taking anyone seriously, and just makes me think of a ratchet hoe who will eventually have onlyfans to promote what other men give her.

This movie is as strangely intoxicating as the female star and the scenic setting. This story of a seductive woman whose impact on the men she meets is of mythological proportions could only work because of the mastery of the performances and the chemistry of the cast. This young woman, who is as bright as she is seductive, has embarked on a mission to explore life and its emotional entanglements. This movie, Italian in origin, is in many ways a modern version of the story outlined in Jules Danson's "Never on Sunday". Parthenope is to the film, very much what Melina Mercury was to the former. She is complex, desired , and misunderstood. Gary Oldman is great in this. Something about this movie just captured m