Paolo Sorrentino, for over 20 years one of the most vibrant and distinctive film-makers, is coming close to self-parody with this new film, which conceitedly announces its own beauty at every moment and finally drifts into an unearned elegiac torpor. It’s an exercise in style, with much bikini-clad gorgeousness and languorous image-making. There are some very exotic touches and though the camera movements are less hyperactive and angular than in his early work, this does not necessarily signal a new maturity; the lessening of flourishes might simply expose something rather facile.
We are in permanently sunny Naples and Parthenope, played by Celeste Dalla Porta with an unchanging Mona Lisa smile, is a young woman from a well-off Neapolitan background who is haunted by a tragic incident in her past, when her two older brothers were both incestuously obsessed by her beauty. Now she is destined possibly to be an academic anthropologist, as her professor (Silvio Orlando) is profoundly impressed by her intellectual brilliance. He himself is a shy, divorced man living with his son, who is unseen and evidently has some kind of burdensome medical condition. Yet when Parthenope finally does lay eyes on this son, and reacts with spiritual rapture, it is one of the film’s most tiresome and fatuous moments of sub-magic-realism.
