According to myth, the mermaid Partenope was the one who shaped Naples with her features. They highlighted its beauty, and that was reflected in the forms of the Italian city. That is where the filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino was born, and he remembers it whenever he can. Not only that, but he has recently wanted to honor his birthplace through his cinema.
If with his first films he had made a satirical portrait of Rome in The great beauty, or had x-rayed several of the most controversial (and corrupt) characters of recent Italy such as Berlusconi or Andreoti, now it seems that he wants his particular style to remain linked to Naples. In It was the hand of God He undertook one of those autofiction exercises that we have seen so much in recent years to tell about his founding moment as a filmmaker and the death of his parents, from which he escaped by staying to watch a Maradona match (hence the name of the film). .
He does not leave Naples, but now he looks at it through the eyes of a woman, one of his few female protagonists, in Parthenope, who takes the name of that mermaid to give it to her protagonist and review the history of her city. He does so with his delight in the beauty embodied by the actress Celeste Dalla Porta, who will meet numerous men who fall in love with her, among them a John Cheever played by Gary Oldman.
Sorrentino, who always answers with a sarcastic tone that one cannot quite decipher if he is serious or joking, does not consider that it was a “necessity” to make two consecutive films in Naples. “I have lived in Naples for 37 years. I have spent a large part of my life in Naples. It was the hand of God It is an autobiographical film, and Naples appears because I spent my life there, but it was not a film about the city. Naples has been everything to me in that my experiences, my training, my emotions have been shaped there… I wanted to make a film about this city, a film that was free of all these personal experiences,” said the director at the last Festival. of San Sebastián Cinema.
For this reason, he believes that “he would not be a director if he had not been born in Naples.” He says it “for many different reasons.” “For everything that comes with being born in Naples, for knowing the Neapolitans, training there, and because in the 90s there was great cinematographic vitality in the city that allowed me to train. Practically everything I do is a child of Naples. Because of irony, a certain sensitivity and the constant recourse to beauty. “All that is Naples,” he adds.
It is not strange that he mentions beauty, a constant in his cinema. He looks for it in every corner, in every frame, and in Parthenope It is from the very conception of the film, whose “base is the idea that the greatness and beauty of life is found in the course of time.” “All lives have something heroic about them, if only because of the length and breadth of life. All people are a repository of illusions, disappointments, failed loves, losses, achievements, mistakes and impossible things. Experiences. And contrary to what is often said, we don’t know what to do with all that. We have not changed one bit from the beginning and all we do is remember it,” he explains about his film.
One of the novelties is that here it gives the spotlight, for the first time, to a woman. He flatly denies that he wrote it differently just because he is, because he only knows how to “write in one way.” “When I write about a woman I do it with the same approach as when I write about anything else, and it is a loving approach. I need to fall in love with the character, and falling in love also means entering his world with curiosity. It’s not easy to do it about what a woman’s world is like, so I try to imagine what that world is like. But the same thing happened to me with Andreotti, I don’t know Andreotti’s world like I don’t know women,” he justifies.
Her sarcasm ends when she is asked if she doesn’t believe that the search for beauty in this film may have eroticized its protagonist, in front of whom her camera appears as enthralled as all the characters who come across her: “In the time of the McCarthyism questioned a great writer named Lillian Hellman. When questioned, she replied that she had no intention of adding her awareness to this year’s fashion. And that is his answer to your question.”
What no one can deny is that a viewer can recognize that a Sorrentino film is Sorrentino’s. There is something in his style that makes him have what is usually called his own universe. Mainly an aesthetic one. He doesn’t feel it as a compliment, but as “a double-edged sword.” “On the one hand it is praise, and I appreciate it, but on the other it shows my own limitations, it indicates that I am not capable of getting out of myself no matter what, and from time to time it is very pleasant to be able to get out of yourself ”, he points out.
Just as he does not write differently whether his protagonist is a woman or a man, his way of approaching a project does not change depending on whether it is for cinemas or Netflix, as happened with It was the hand of God. Now it changes to the platform through A24, the most cool from the US, but he says that he has worked the same with some as with others because it is only “a distribution issue, not about how the film is made and it is something that responds to the demands of the market.” To give strength to his argument he adds that he has filmed the series in the same way, “as if it were a movie.”
“At its core, a film is an object that is thrown out the window and then you lose control. You don’t know if people are going to see it in the cinema, on television, on the mobile phone… This film is made for the big screen, but tomorrow there may be someone who is going to see it on the mobile phone. So this debate, which I had even forgotten was a current debate, seems to me to be a somewhat academic debate,” he concludes with recovered sarcasm.
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