Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope is a beautifully constructed, if not thematically unfocused, story of a young woman enraptured by the outside world, while neglecting her interior self.

Newcomer Celeste Dalla Porta gives a star-making performance as Parthenope, rich with confidence and poise, commanding a magnetizing presence and control. Her epic story spans from her water birth in the Bay of Naples through young adulthood, experiencing first loves, and ultimately choosing herself, her education, and career. She looks back on her youth, later in her years, and ponders the life her choices brought her. 

As a teenager and young woman, her closest bonds are with her older brother Raimondo (to a borderline incestuous level) and boyfriend Sandrino, but tragedy sets her off on a new course of independence, splitting away from others her own age. The familiarity and intimacy of the known world are discarded, for what awaits in the unknown.

Parthenope enters adulthood, where she is guided by older, established, (mostly male) figures of power and authority – among them a professor, an acting teacher, a bishop – and she gives each of them something in return. In her own pursuit of knowledge and self-improvement, she herself is the spark to surprise and inspire, for others whose stage in life may have caused them to stop dreaming.

Parthenope’s name alludes to the mythological siren who cast herself into the sea at Naples, after her singing could not tempt the hero Odysseus. Parthenope here in the film certainly has a presence and aura that magnetizes others to her, but is not a true siren (in a destructive sense) and is more like a muse, sparking inspiration for others in a mutually beneficial exchange.

Her modus operandi creates a series of one-on-one encounters, but not establishing long-term connections, and what she collects is the gradual expanse of her mind. She witnesses aspects of Neapolitan life outside her orbit – that of the impoverished, the Camorra criminal underworld, religious bureaucracy – as a passer-by, gaining perspective and greater understanding of the world around her. Her experiences shape her intellectual worldview, but her intimate personal life is passionless.

With its sweeping scope and ambitious length (nearly two and a half hours), the impact of Parthenope is enigmatic and somewhat unsatisfying. Her shift from youth to adulthood, growing in the world around her, mirrors the Hero’s Journey on a textual level, but her experiences feel less progressive than scattered. Her encounters are glimpses into various facets of Neapolitan life, but don’t add up into an aggregate impact.

It is an incomplete portrait of its heroine, without a clear glimpse of her interior life, and its vision of Naples feels limited to interior spaces – villas, church quarters, private homes – without a larger sense of community and place. But if innate unknowability is the intended impact, why does the story of this young woman, in this city, matter if they are so lithely defined that the movie could be about anyone, in any place?

Like Sorrentino’s other movies, Parthenope is fabulously crafted, with stunning seaside villas and resorts, ornate high-society parties, and a thoughtful, eclectic soundtrack with music spanning from classical to mid-century Latin to Italian pop. It is a film rich with visual and musical pleasures, on a purely sensory level, even if its emotional core remains impenetrable and unknowable.

Parthenope was screened at the 2025 Palm Springs International Film Festival and is being distributed by A24, coming to US theaters starting February 7, 2025.