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, breathing human being. She is adored but not known, desired but not understood.

The film unfolds across decades, tracing Parthenope’s journey through the sun-drenched summers of 1960s and ‘70s Naples. In 1968, she enrols in an anthropology course taught by the formidable professor, a grizzled academic who becomes the first person to recognise her sharp intellect rather than simply her face.

But the world outside the lecture hall remains suffocating. During a summer in Capri in 1973, Parthenope finds herself entangled in a tragic love triangle involving her beloved brother and his best friend. The intensity of their desires creates a pressure cooker of emotion. When her beloved brother witnesses his friend's seduction of Parthenope, he throws himself from the cliffs in despair.

This devastating event casts a long shadow. Her mother blames her. Her father retreats into detachment. The message is clear: her beauty is not a gift but a curse, a force that destroys everything it touches.

Even religion offers no sanctuary. In one of the film’s most controversial scenes, Parthenope participates in a ritualistic union with a cardinal during the Feast of San Gennaro. As she engages in a sex act, the saint’s blood miraculously liquefies: a sacrilegious juxtaposition that pushes the exploitation of her beauty to its apex. In that moment, she sees with perfect clarity: if she remains here as a “deity,” she will never possess the authenticity of being “human.”

To resist this feverish predicament, she chooses anthropology. The discipline demands that one enter amongst people while maintaining distance, that one observe and record with cold precision without being swept up by emotion. This grants her a crucial repositioning: from “the one being seen” to “the one who sees others”; from a goddess on a pedestal to a mortal taking field notes.

This transformation is an escape spanning decades. She must flee those rapacious gazes until time itself has thoroughly blurred her contours. Her academic journey takes her through various encounters: witty exchanges with the celebrated writer, intimate moments with ageing actress Flora Malva, and even a dangerous liaison with a mafioso that results in a pregnancy and subsequent abortion.

Each experience becomes data, a way of understanding human behaviour whilst maintaining the observer’s distance. By 1982, she has established herself as a university scholar and finally accepted a teaching position at the University of Trento. Despite her deep love for her city, Parthenope ultimately chooses a deliberate choice to forge her own path, even if it means separation from her origins.

When the elderly Parthenope (now played by the legendary Stefania Sandrelli) finally sheds her scholar’s armour and returns to Naples in 2023, the streets are engulfed in frenzied celebration: the local football team has won the championship. The city remains as it ever was, self-sustaining in its chaos.

The irony is exquisite: once, she was the sacrificial offering on that “sacred altar,” transfixed by ten thousand eyes. Now, aged, she has become utterly invisible. She stands in the crowd, her wrinkled face illuminated by fireworks, and for the first time in her life, no one is looking at her.

This “not being seen” is anthropology’s final mercy to her. The question that haunted her entire life—What is anthropology? —finally comes full circle: anthropology isn’t about defining the Other; it’s about extracting oneself from “the object being defined” to become a thorough and silent witness.

She has spent a lifetime earning a ticket to re-enter life as a member of the “audience.” She is no longer a statue obliged to maintain perfection, but simply an old woman in the crowd, capable of wonder, watching this city vividly happen before her eyes. She has finally contracted from Naples’s “oracle” into a concrete “person.”

I love this film because it articulates something I’ve felt but struggled to name: the violence of being constantly seen, constantly reduced to what others project onto you. Whether it’s beauty, intelligence, ethnicity, or any other visible marker, there’s a particular suffocation that comes from being treated as a symbol rather than a person.

Parthenope’s journey resonates because she doesn’t reject her beauty or her city, but simply refuses to let them define her entirely. She uses the coldest, most analytical discipline available to create distance, to develop her own gaze. In doing so, she transforms from an object of worship into a subject with agency, from a myth into a woman.

Sorrentino, known for his explorations of male power and corruption in films like Il Divo and The Hand of God, takes an unusual turn by placing a woman at the centre of such an epic narrative. As he observes,

“Epic tales historically were male-dominated, and they had almost exclusively male protagonists. Therefore, I thought it would be repetitive... When we’re focusing on an epic dimension, the epic dimension belongs to women in this day and age a lot more than it belongs to men.”

Through ravishingly gorgeous cinematography, Parthenope tells a story about disenchantment and self-reclamation. When the elderly Parthenope’s face is illuminated by fireworks, anonymous in the celebrating crowd, that quiet expression contains everything: loneliness and reconciliation, loss and liberation, the weight of half a century and the lightness of finally being free.

She has become what she always needed to be: just another face in the crowd, watching her city burn bright with joy, finally able to see it clearly because no one is looking back.