“Beauty is like war — it opens doors,” says the middle-aged American writer John Cheever (Gary Oldman) to Parthenope (Celeste Dalla Porta), a statuesque brunette from Naples whom he meets at a resort. It’s southern Italy, 1973, and Cheever (Oldman in a small but memorably melancholic part) strikes up a friendship with her early on in the film.
“Parthenope,” a characteristically decadent drama by the director Paolo Sorrentino, is about all the doors opened by Parthenope’s beauty. At first — when she’s seen primarily in a bikini, lounging by crystalline ocean waters — this means capturing the hearts of male suitors, like her namesake siren from Greek mythology.
Cheever, who in real life spent years traveling around Italy, is one of the few men in the film who is immune to her charms — maybe it’s the booze, or his repressed yearning for men. Or maybe its because a woman like her should be admired from a distance as one does a religious icon or marble statue.
If this way of idealizing women sounds painfully retrograde, know that Sorrentino isn’t interested in realism — or political correctness, for that matter. His work (including the Oscar winner “The Great Beauty” and the HBO series “The Young Pope”) is less about people than it is about big ideas: art, desire, religion, and, yes, beauty; the way they shape our lives with an almost mystical power.
Now add to this an enduring fixation with Sorrentino’s native Italy, its past and present, and its contradictions. The country is home to some of the world’s great triumphs — think ancient Rome and the Sistine Chapel — but the director also depicts it as a hotbed of spiritual rot personified by its corrupt leaders. At one point in the film, Parthenope enjoys a dalliance with a monstrous bishop (Peppe Lanzetta), representing a union of the sacred and the profane.
“Parthenope,” like Sorrentino’s previous films, is an intentionally garish display of sex and luxury that is both irritating and oddly seductive. From the opening scene, in which baby Parthenope is gifted a carriage from Versailles, there’s an otherworldly feel that runs through the film, accented by gliding pans, voyeuristic close-ups and touches of the surreal.
Beginning in 1950, Parthenope’s birth year, the film quickly skips ahead to 1968 — and later the ’70s — showing her maturation through a series of symbolic interactions with other people. There’s her romance with a local boy (Dario Aita) and her vaguely incestuous relationship with her older brother (Daniele Rienzo). For a spell, she considers becoming an actress, though gloomy encounters with two older divas (Isabella Ferrari and Luisa Ranieri) dissuade her.
Parthenope also has a beautiful mind. At university she earns top marks in the anthropology department and wins over a grumpy professor (Silvio Orlando) who eventually becomes her mentor and guides her to a tenure track position.
This is Sorrentino’s first movie in which the main character is a woman, and because he’s more interested in deifying Parthenope than he is in humanizing her, the portrait is inherently limited — and frequently dull. The opulence on display, coupled with the film’s languid visual style, can feel anesthetizing.
At least the hypnotizing Dalla Porta brings a strength and sadness to the role that underscores the film’s most compelling argument: Beauty may inspire awe and worship, but it also alienates. Can you ever be loved if you can never truly be known?
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