Paolo Sorrentino
Parthenope

As an admirer of Sorrentino, I say that this time he has gone beyond. The aesthetics are fine, the fetishes are fine, the juxtaposition of scenes that seem like paintings, the trash and irreverence, but without a solid story behind, without characterized characters, without a binding agent, everything becomes almost a parody, a desire to be deep and beautiful without the "background" on which to build those reflections, those scenes.

Result: even the most dramatic and intense moments pass without emotions, because we know little about those characters, we are told the minimum, for at least two reasons. One, the director is too caught up in constructing captivating frames and scenes in themselves, to find space and time to also tell us who those characters are. Those we see on screen are just models, empty mannequins in visually memorable sequences.

Two, it seems that his writer's vein has dangerously veered this time towards philosophical-existential, but without a concrete matter to reflect on (the events of Andreotti, those of Silvio, his own, to give three examples from the past). The very contents from which to derive the reflections are missing. Meditative dialogues, brilliant intuitions, witty answers follow one another, but what is lacking is the essential construct of which stories are made: ordinary dialogues, details that give context, scenes of everyday life, anecdotes, but also life goals, frank exchanges and not always condescending, an exposition of the characters' inner selves flatter and less pretentious (obviously from whoever writes the screenplay).

Here instead everything is so aesthetically tuned as to appear unreal, schematic, cold.

Sorrentino trims the “banal” to focus on his fetishes, which always work as individual scenes, but thus the organic nature of the overall work is missing: we are never captured by the story, we remain distant from it. The phases of Parthenope's life are juxtaposed wearily, without a common thread, because we don't see coherence, but only a dragging forward in disparate contexts and overly inflated digressions. A driver, a motivation, is missing.

If he really had something to tell, Sorrentino would not have dedicated such large portions of his film to scenes like the “public" sexual relationship between two camorra heirs, or to the long branch dedicated to the relationship between the girl and the bishop of Naples, as enjoyable as it may be. I'm sure he did it just for the pleasure of shooting that scene there, her wearing the treasure of San Gennaro.

Even the aesthetics, compared to the past, focus too much on a single subject: a beautiful girl, which isn’t even such an original idea. The shots of the love triangle are splendid, the disillusionment of the diva Greta Cool is sharp, the contradictions of the bishop are amusing, but what prevails (for me) is the presumption of wanting to be deep and intellectual without having in his pen the strength to really be so, or to be so once again. The philosophical maxims that follow one another gratuitously are a clear sign of the author's fatigue. We need to find the humility to craftily tell life, without placing ourselves on a pedestal and judging everything and everyone.

The previous film worked better precisely because it narrated Naples from the people's point of view, from the kind woman devouring a mozzarella to the fan threatening to kill himself if Maradona doesn't arrive. It had its own authenticity. Here we move among the elites: intellectuals, professors, film stars, bosses, ecclesiastical hierarchies. You can see that these characters don’t feel like his own. By continuing to search for a definition for the city from above, they do nothing but distance themselves from it, from its throbbing and putrescent heart.

The betrayal of Sorrentino-Parthenope for his Naples.