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Is she a mermaid or a myth?
Partenope is a woman named after her city. In Greek myth, Partenope is a mermaid who committed suicide after failing to charm Odysseus.
In the film, Partenope is the embodiment of the city of Naples
Her body was washed up by the tide to where Castel dell’Ovo is now built, and she gave her name to the city that would later become Neapolis, Naples. Heat Written by Peter Gregson Performed by Peter Gregson, Warren Zielinski, Magdalena Filipczak, Laurie Anderson, Ashok Klouda.
That’s what I like about Sorrentino, that his films are like a book with a thousand existential questions that collide like electrons in the atom of our consciousness, trying to find the integrity of our own self
Partenope is exactly that kind of film, prompting us to ask so many questions: what do we think about when our gaze is wandering; what is it to not take advantage of the beauty you are gifted with and what price will you pay for it; how powerful is love when we are young; how do you bear the burden of being smarter than others and does that make you anomalous or just a sad and misunderstood person; has love, as a means of survival, failed; when is it time to leave; Yet, there are questions to which we are not ready to know the answers, because we have not gone through suffering, and only that is the key to awareness. Parthenope is a sad film in which personal freedom is forced to be locked up in order to survive and not be killed by a tyrannical, retrograde society that has one main occupation – to judge everyone with the iron hammer of its prejudices and traditions.
A small hell in an apparent paradise where not everyone survives
And in Naples, as we see, there are a lot of them. To find out what the outcome is for the minority whose emotional intelligence does not match the prejudices of the public, watch Parthenope and suffer!
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