When Beauty Becomes a Cage: Sorrentino's Parthenope

In most arthouse films, beautiful heroines are destined to fall in love with art itself. Yet Italian director Paolo Sorrentino takes his beauty, Parthenope, down a different path into a university lecture hall, where she picks up anthropology textbooks and teaches students about “ritual” and “the Other.”

Why would a Neapolitan beauty choose such a dry discipline, one devoted to studying remote tribes and vanished civilisations? To understand this radical choice, we must begin with her name.

Parthenope was a Siren in ancient Greek mythology: a beautiful sea nymph who lured sailors to their deaths with her song. In the Odyssey, Odysseus plugged his crew’s ears with wax and lashed himself to the mast to sail past her strait. Humiliated by being ignored, Parthenope threw herself into the sea. Her body washed ashore in a bay where a city eventually rose, bearing the ancient name Parthenope: what we now call Naples.

Sorrentino’s choice of name is no accident: Parthenope is Naples, and Naples is Parthenope. From its very birth, this city has been subjected to the gaze of outsiders: Greeks, Romans, Spaniards… each marvelling at its beauty before occupying it, consuming it, and departing with their spoils. Never given the chance to define itself, the city could only wrap its flesh in chaos and miracles, resisting the fate of being defined through sheer, overwhelming vitality.

The film’s protagonist, played with haunting stillness by newcomer Celeste Dalla Porta, mirrors this precisely. Born in 1950 in the shallows of the Bay of Naples, she emerges from the sea as a teenager and is immediately greeted with gasps: “A goddess!” They compare her to the Virgin Mary, “Our Lady, Star of the Sea.” Her beauty borders on the unfair. Cameras follow her, crowds pursue her, yet this sensation of “being gazed upon by the entire world” is anything but love.

When people look at her, they see a symbol, a goddess statue requiring worship. What they emphatically do not see is a living, b…