I watched this on the 29th of April, 2025, in the Picturehouse.
Gorgeous. It’s a coming-of-age set in the south of Italy, from 1950 to the modern day, and my god it is shot wonderfully, lush in sun-bleached streets, azure seas and beautiful people everywhere. I read a review afterwards which compared it to a two-and-a-half hour cologne ad lol.
The central story is about a girl, Parthenope, named for both the ancient siren (παρθένος, maiden + ὄψ, voice), who cast herself into the sea when her songs failed to entice Odysseus, and the ancient predecessor of the city of Naples. She’s beautiful, quick-witted, and flighty, and the film tracks her from birth, through her degrees, her flings and the characters she meets, the suicide of her brother, and her coming to terms with how the world perceives her, her own character, and her relationships with love.
The good parts: phenomenal acting from everyone involved, and Gary Oldman in particular is captivating for the few scenes he’s around, playing an old, washed-up, and ragged English author. Celeste Dalla Porta (main character) was amazing too, playing a character suffused with confidence, an unconscious and affected grace, and a calculated openness.
I think one immediate criticism was that it was very objectifying at the start: entirely too many bikini shots, and the camera neatly fitting us behind the eyes of characters and extras who desire her. However (and maybe this is a charitable reading because I really do want to like this movie), I think this is part of her development. These kind of shots vanish almost entirely halfway through the film, I think representing at first her unconscious grace and desirability, and how this seeps into almost all peer-relationships she has, turning into something she is aware of and can control, and which she uses to put together her life. She goes from being automatically, pervasively desired despite her unawareness, to controlling it like a lid on roiling water, revealing it whenever she wants.
Even so, at this point she hasn’t come to terms with how it has affected her relationships, how it blinded her to her brother’s impending suicide, her childhood friend’s infatuation, and others, until the end of the movie, where we jump to her retiring after the end of a successful career in anthropology. It’s quite a sudden jump, and a startling and disconcerting juxtaposition of her lush youth with her old age. She has to return to the city of her birth, and reflect on her time there, her brother and her friends and her loves, and come to terms with who she was and who she has become. It’s a really great moment.
Something else I think the film did very effectively was raise the point of beauty privilege. Parthenope is not a nice character. She’s flaky, incommital, and can be very cruel. The fact that people desire her anyway is shown, at the start of the film, to be a product of her looks, and her affection. People are flattered that she can smile at them, and show interest (not affected at the start, but definitely later); she uses this to her advantage. By the end of the film though, she is shown to have grown and matured as a character; people like her because she is whip-smart, uncompromising, and interesting. The viewer (at least, myself) is given this switch as well: we like her when she is young and beautiful and smart and affectionate, we like her less and less as she enters her twenties and becomes cynical and cruel, and we like her again when she is old.
And finally, one bit of excellent writing: she studies anthropology. Throughout the movie, we see her looking back at the viewer and characters, considering how she affects them, watching the lines of desire and avarice, carefully changing her responses and her body to influence, attract, repel. There’s a gruff professor, who she forms a paternal bond with, whom she keeps asking: ‘what is anthropology’? She isn’t given an answer until near the end, when he replies, ‘anthropology is seeing’. She says wonderingly, ‘is that it? but…i do that all the time’.
Also not mentioned: weird massive malformed baby the size of a car, weird explicit sex ritual, finance bro who looks like a shark, and a dirty priest who fingers her in a cathedral. 8/10 would watch again.