Parthenope

So bella figura conquers all. So much beauty, so senselessly.

This is a film that strives desperately for beauty, sensuality and philosophical depth and only sporadically achieves the first of those.

Narratively, Parthenope is a sprawling mess of off-the-wall digressions...

These picaresque and picturesque adventures fail to coalesce into a movie. But it’s impossible to argue with Daria D’Antonio’s ravishing cinematography and an unexpectedly moving coda featuring Stefania Sandrelli as an older Parthenope.

Parthenope, Paolo Sorrentino’s latest cinema exuberance, flutters like its recurring motif of a silk scarf caught in a Mediterranean breeze -- tantalizing, yet just out of reach.

A two-dimensional examination of gender, tethered to a protagonist with no real depth.

With Parthenope’s final sentence, Sorrentino instills in us the hope that it’s more than acceptable to misunderstand our place in this society, provided we don’t sit and do nothing for too long because everything we have can be over in an instant.

A drama in which Sorrentino, with his usual aesthetic, throws in a couple of shots of Mediterranean elegance, but unfortunately, it's narrative is a vacuous siren song that feels like a paid endorsement from Yves Saint Laurent. [Full review in Spanish]

The character and performance never rise to the robustness of the images, and the film suffers for it, loping along with vague intention, essentially being a stringing-together of odd, almost Odyssey-like encounters.

Celeste Dalla Porta doesn't disappoint as the siren-like Parthenope, a woman as smart as she is attractive, and holds the line as Sorrentino spins his usual web of gorgeous imagery, lush camera glides and knowing references around her.