Parthenope is Jep Gambardella in a bikini, Paolo Sorrentino returns to baroque without ceasing – Il Fatto Quotidiano

Parthenope And Bring Gambardella in a bikini. Paolo Sorrentino returning to the deep bed of his skirted baroque, of his magical way, after such a close and painful It was the hand of God. And it does so by stamping in our faces hundreds of details, close-ups, obscene half-lengths, glossy erotica, sometimes even brassy, ​​of Celeste Dalla Porta. She is Parthenopea memorable double of Sorrento’s black man, a unique protagonist born in 1950 in a very decadent town of Posillipo, among golden carriages, terraces overlooking the sea, bourgeois tables with pointed and pressed shirt collars .

Parthenope grows up attractive, mysterious and quiet reading novels at John Cheever (whom she then meets, drunk, needlessly pompous and philosophical among dozens of empty bottles in a hotel room in Capri always overlooking the sea), going to- in and out dripping with water, driving men attracted to her, an incompetent and weak, mad and drunk student of Anthropology in the seventies, a retired grandmother (Stefania Sandrelli) in 2023 while fan carousels attack Naples after the Scudetto victory of the football team.

The inscrutable secret of the proud beauty of Parthenope (less than this time of this blessed city of Naples), how to find happiness that cannot be lost, is the ever-changing heart, over time escapes, deceives and then stops, of films where Dalla is. Porta is a lot, too much, quantitatively. So, at a certain moment, thanks to the usual elephantine stasis of the Sorrento cinema over an hour and a half of film, that body, those details, those smiles, find us, after many panoramic views , definitively nonsensical.

Parthenope moves through the slow motion of sixty with flowing dresses and the slow rhythms of high-fashion advertising, interesting and tight tracking scenes often in a dramatic gap to nothing, single scenes with at least three actors where the test is different distances to focus the profiles. Sorrentino continues, and always, through unnecessary and grotesque additions (la Sofia Loren / Greta Cool a rude and greedy diva who loves anal sex; the rude actress Malva Flora; the irresponsible bishop with extremely sad hands), allowing the narrative to deliberately melt into the porous non-linearity of the plot, trying to bring out a hidden suggestive artificiality full of aphorisms and catch phrases (“at the end of life only the irony”; “when you know everything you die early and only”; “I don’t know but I like to everything”).

Indeed, often, the characters in Sorrentino’s cinema, free to move around in large and elegant interior settings and other open spaces, seem as if they are self-enclosed. functional to refer to their own arrogance, their own archaic features, their own snobbish idioms, instead of finding or searching for a complete synthesis, rational organism. Every man for himself and Sorrentino for all, in short. Parthenope gives flavor a chic fetishisman end in itself, of another show that immerses its creativity in the bending of contemporary art for an elegant concept of shameful beauty (the teacher’s monstrous son played by S.Elvis Orlandothe multi-legged anti-cholera spider) more kitsch than genre.

One last note: among such style, such millimetric control of the stage and the subsequent rewriting of the film in post, there is one thing that Sorrentino does not do very well: leading Hollywood stars. Of holy monsters like Michael Caine e Harvey Keitel in Youth no one remembers frame anymore, of Sean Penn the big wig This must be the place only a few traces remain of the posters. While Gary Oldman that makes Cheever a very gay dandy but the need for his presence is essential. The newly created Piperfilm is released in theaters. In theaters from October 24.