It's difficult to summarize Parthenope — calling it a coming-of-age story feels insufficient. The titular Parthenope (Celeste Dalla Porta) is the sexiest girl in Naples, so sexy that even her brother wants to sleep with her, and though director Paolo Sorrentino won't go so far as to show two siblings have sex, he heavily implies that they do. And so opens the first third of the film, preoccupied with Parthenope's beauty and the love triangle between her, her brother (Daniele Rienzo), and his best friend, Sandri (Dario Aita).
Once this plot unceremoniously dissolves, we follow Parthenope as she oscillates between choosing an academic life studying anthropology or becoming an actress. Many people Parthenope encounters ask her what she's thinking, but the script isn't strong enough to give us more than a vague suggestion. Many also warn Parthenope that she'll end up like them (a grumpy professor, a miserable actress), but it's hard to tell why they make that judgment since she's so indecisive. For all we know, she only wants to be an actress because a stranger told her she should. Repeated bits of dialogue can evoke the cyclical nature of life, but in Parthenope, it's more out of laziness than realism; and quite frankly, it's annoying to hear characters asking the same questions and throwing away the same aphorisms for two hours.
For a movie that's been marketed as extremely horny, the sex depicted in the film is anything but. Early in the film, while declining a rich older man's advances, Parthenope posits, "Don't you find that desire is a mystery, and sex its funeral?" which Sorrentino uses as his guiding principle. For every depiction of sex on screen, something horrible happens. It's as though Sorrentino believes sex to be an act for which his characters deserve punishment.
(Spoiler alert — this next paragraph reveals details of the plot.) After she and Sandri have dispassionate sex, Parthenope's brother throws himself off a cliff to his death. While touring the seedier side of Naples with a mafioso, she watches a sterile mating ritual in which two members of rival gangs fuck while under the supervision of the other bosses in an attempt to bring the two families together. Later, the mafioso impregnates Parthenope and she has an abortion. At one point, a cardinal fingers her, marking the only time we see a sliver of pleasure for Parthenope, but we're also supposed to see him as a vaguely gross figure, as shown in his haphazard hair dying, and a bit of a con man. It's clear that Sorrentino delights in tormenting his protagonist. There are several long shots of Parthenope crying, but she cries too beautifully for it to telegraph anything meaningful to the audience. Sorrentino doesn't care about killing his darlings; he wants to watch them suffer.
It'd be unfair to suggest that Sorrentino wishes for his audience to suffer, too. The filmmaker drenches Parthenope in such sentimentality that it's difficult to definitively distinguish this film as camp; its self-awareness is anyone's guess. The film contains a ghastly but somewhat touching performance from Gary Oldman as the alcoholic writer John Cheever, even though there doesn't appear to be any relevant connection between him and Capri; certainly not in any of his work. Aside from the utterly bonkers character names — Parthenope's acting teacher is called Flora Malva, and the miserable actress's name is Greta Cool — Parthenope continues to baffle when she meets each of these two aging and uniquely disfigured women who claim that their rival "loves anal sex." Sorrentino plays the moment for laughs, but it falls flat — indistinguishable from a flurry of other equally ridiculous moments.
The one high point for the film can be found in its beautiful cinematography, though it's only because Naples is beautiful, and so is the cast. None of the shots of the film are particularly breathtaking — they are mostly blinding — and, barring one single memorable image, none seem particularly well thought out or original either. Most elements have been thrown together with as much care as Cardinal Vescovo dyes his hair.
Parthenope joins a collection of films that have cropped up over the past few years that are about filmmaking — a theme that is addressed with various levels of obviousness (The Fabelmans, Bergman Island, The Souvenir and its Part II, The Brutalist). For Sorrentino, Parthenope's study of anthropology serves as a stand-in for filmmaking in the same way that architecture plays that role in Brady Corbet's The Brutalist, though Corbet doesn't go so far as to have one of his characters call Billy Wilder an architect.
Sorrentino plays Parthenope's pursuits off one another as though they don't go hand in hand: acting and filmmaking. Even without drawing this foregone conclusion, acting and anthropology work as complements to one another, rather than being fierce opponents. "Anthropology is seeing," Professor Marotta tells Parthenope towards the end of the film. Applying this same logic to Parthenope, we can ask ourselves what Sorrentino wants us to see. The answer is as murky as his titular character's aspirations.