The past few weeks have seen huge activity in the sphere of cinema. The Cairo audience has been overwhelmed with films from all over the world, first films from the seventh El Gouna Film Festival (24 October-1 November) screened in collaboration with Cinema Zawya, then the 45th Cairo International Film Festival (13-22 November), and now the 17th Panorama of the European Film (28 November-7 December), a major highlight on the calendars of Egyptian cinephiles.

This year the Panorama’s programming team managed to give the audience a hearty package filled with carefully selected, exquisite productions from the Old Continent. The opening which took place last Thursday featured the Italian production Parthenope written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino. He is one of the most prominent Italian filmmakers of his generation. The film premiered in the official competition of Cannes Film Festival 2024.

Parthenope depicts the life of its eponymous heroine (Celeste Dalla Porta), who lives in Naples and belongs to an upper class family. The script is inspired by a Greek myth of a siren who used to charm men and drag them into the sea, then killed herself after failing to enchant Odysseus. But the Roman version of the myth tells a different story. It concerns a centaur named Vesuvius who is madly in love with Parthenope. This angers Jupiter who turns the centaur into a volcano and turns Parthenope to Naples. But neither version of the myth overpowers the story of the film, which showcases various years in the life of the protagonist as she grows up and faces challenges and gains experience.

It opens in 1950 showing Parthenope being born in sea water in front of the family’s mansion. The filmmaker manages to tell the story by depicting the protagonist’s influence on her male friends and acquaintances, while she doesn’t have specific feelings for any of them, with all her strong feelings reserved for her city, Naples.  

First, she is 18 and the son of the family’s housekeeper Sandrino (Dario Aita) is in love with her, waiting for her to reciprocate. This is intentionally contrasted with her brother Raimondo (Daniele Rienzo​​) who seems to suffer from a kind of deep depression and has similar feelings for her. When the relationship with Sandrino evolves into a sexual act, Raimondo commits suicide. This tragic act is the turning point that alters the drama of the whole film. Her parents separate, and she has to seek out her own future.

The only male character in the film is the American novelist John Cheever (Gary Oldman) who is on a vacation in Italy. Parthenope seems interested in making his acquaintance, as she has read all of his works. But the scenes that bring them together are very few, though the dialogue includes some philosophical sentences and information that changes the development of the drama. For example, he seems to have feelings for her like most of the male characters, but he tells her that he is more interested in men. One of his great lines is that he doesn’t want to waste a minute of her youth on himself.

The script makes her extremely intelligent. When she goes to the university she is studying anthropology. The filmmaker shows the changes that take place within that generation witnessing the tides of the leftist movement among the university students seeking freedom. Her relationship with her professor Devoto Marotta (Silvio Orlando) seems to be of a different kind as he has fatherly feelings for her. What is interesting is when he opens up to her when she becomes his assistant, and years later when he decides to retire nominates her to take his place. He invites her to his house and introduces her to his son, an abnormally huge person who is mentally ill.

A filthy rich Neapolitan (Paolo Mazzarelli) who owns a helicopter wants to have one night with her. She at last agrees to have a drink with him in an open air garden, but soon she can immediately tell he is not what she wants. A similar scene is when she examines her feelings towards wealth and power, as she throws herself in the world of Camorra when she goes with its leader to the underworld of Naples and the poorest district in the old city. Here the filmmaker creates an extraordinary scene when she witnesses two newly married couples from two Camorra families making love in front of some family members who need to see “the fruit of the union”. Artistically, the Naples underworld sequence has very alluring shots that seem to be inspired by 19th-century post-Impressionism, with visuals that recall Vincent van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters.

Another aesthetic sequence is when she goes to Naples Cathedral to meet with the Bishop (Peppe Lanzetta), another kind of wealth and power, to ask him about the treasure of San Gennaro. This part shows the beauty of the Gothic architecture, but the drama doesn’t clarify why the protagonist and the bishop have sex.
When Parthenope goes to a famous actress in hopes of becoming a film star we see the underworld of the theatre and cinema along with her. However, she finds that she doesn’t have the talent or the capacity to cope with the environment, so she returns to the field of anthropology and the university.

Some viewers felt that parts of the film were incohesive, but the aesthetic power of the whole is beyond reproach. It is an astonishing work of art accomplished by both the filmmaker and DOP Daria d’Antonio. Parthenope contains tropes of Italian cinema: the organised crime family, the Gothic cathedral, even sweating in the summer. And this sense it can easily be seen as a tribute to the history of Italian film.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 5 December, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly