Parents' Guide to Parthenope

This long life story contains many beauties, rhyming imagery, and repeated bits of dialogue meant to sound clever and witty, but it soon becomes clear that there's not much going on. With Parthenope, Italian-born, Oscar-winning filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino returns to his beloved Naples—and, even better, he returns with Dalla Porta, who apparently played a small, uncredited part in Sorrentino's The Hand of God. He undoubtedly noticed her while making that movie and gave her this very large, very central leading role as a result, perhaps hoping to follow in the footsteps of the old Italian masters and their muses (Anita Ekberg splashing in the Trevi Fountain in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita, Sophia Loren becoming a star in Vittorio De Sica's Two Women, Monica Vitti being vacantly mysterious in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, etc.).

It's been clear since The Great Beauty that Sorrentino is trying to follow in the footsteps of Fellini, who openly explored his own past, childhood, fantasies, and longings in grandiose style. But it's less clear what Sorrentino himself is actually trying to say, especially here. Parthenope seems more concerned with beauty as a concept than with humanness. It continually returns to and echoes images and sounds, attempting to mirror them and to seem like it's building to something. But ultimately they're just pretty pictures and pretty sounds, and it all just wafts out to sea on a warm breeze.