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Is she a mermaid or a myth?
Partenope is a woman who bears the name of her city. In Greek myth, Partenope is the mermaid who committed suicide after failing to enchant Odysseus. Her body was carried by the tide to the site where the Castel dell’Ovo is built, and for this reason she gave her name to the city that would later become Neapolis, Naples.
In the film, Partenope is the personification of the city of Naples
Heat Written by Peter Gregson Directed 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 of 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 one of those films, instigating us with so many questions: what do we think when our gaze flies; what it is not to use the beauty that is gifted to you, and what price you will pay for it; What is the power of love when you are young?
When is it time to let go?
How do you bear the burden of being smarter than others and does this make you an abnormal person or just sad and misunderstood? If love, as a means of survival, has failed? What does personal freedom become when you lock it in a cage?
And in Naples, as we saw, there are many of them
Still, there are questions we are not ready to know the answers to, because we have not gone through suffering, and only this is the key to awareness. Parthenope is a sad film where personal freedom is forced to be locked away in order to survive and not be killed by the tyrannical and backward 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.
The important thing is not to judge anyone, so that you are not judged!
To find out what the outcome is for the minority whose emotional intelligence does not conform to public prejudice, watch Parthenope and Suffer!