Review: 'Parthenope' bursts with sensual beauty — including from its star, Celeste Della Porto — but without a lot of coherence

Paolo Sorrentino makes movies that’s are extravaganzas of sensual pleasure, just as a cow eats grass — it’s just what they do.

Sorrentino’s latest movie, “Parthenope,” has sensuality bursting from every frame — and in most of those frames, it’s coming from the beautiful actress in the title role, Celeste Della Porta. What’s more elusive, as Della Porta sashays through Naples and leads every man she meets to distraction as Parthenope seeks her life’s purpose, is a coherent thread leading the viewer to any deeper understanding.

Born in the Neapolitan harbor, the adult Parthenope often finds herself by the shore, usually in a bikini. She’s the center of attention at every party at her parents’ seaside house, circa 1968. One of the old men (Alfonso Santagata) asks her, “If I were 40 years younger, would you marry me?,” and she seductively and smartly turns the question around: “If I were 40 years older, would you marry me?”

When Parthenope isn’t fending off leering old men, she actually befriends one — an alcoholic American author visiting Naples. The author, played charmingly by Gary Oldman, asks, “Are you aware of the destruction your beauty causes?” And it’s clear that she does. After a brief friendship, the author tells her she must find her own way. “I don’t want to steal one minute of your youth away from you,” he says.

In her teens and 20s, Parthenope is torn between two men — her melancholy brother, Raimondo (Daniele Rienzo), and Raimondo’s friend and her lover, Sandrino (Dario Alta). The choice she makes leads to a tragedy, and puts Parthenope on a different path.

Except for a flirtation with becoming an actress — when she meets a masked casting director (Isabella Ferrari) and a haughty film star (Luisa Ranieri) — Parthenope chooses academia. She studies anthropology, and finds a professor (Silvio Orlando) who takes her on as his protege. Along the way, there are flings with a brooding movie actor (Marlon Joubert) and a vain bishop (Peppe Lanzetta). 

Sorrentino — whose 2013 movie “The Great Beauty” won the international-film Oscar — reunites with that movie’s cinematographer, Daria D’Antonio, and the pairing is again fruitful. Everywhere D’Antonio points the camera, some bit of breathtaking beauty is to be found, particularly when it’s pointed at Della Porto.

And the young actress holds up her end of the bargain, finding inner depth in Parthenope behind her gorgeous eyes and below her sensuous curves. Alas, Sorrentino can’t bring it together into something more meaningful. In “Parthenope,” Sorrentino offers us only glimpses of the divine in his main character’s radiance.

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‘Parthenope’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 21, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City) and the Century Salt Lake 16 (South Salt Lake). Rated R for strong sexual content/graphic nudity, and language. Running time: 137 minutes; in Italian, with subtitles.