Parthenope was one of the movies I was longing to see.
The title alone was intriguing. Parthenope.
The siren that cast herself into the sea and drowned when she failed to entice Odysseus. Her body washed ashore at Naples. How fitting...
This movie touches so many concepts that I struggle to decrypt till this very moment that I am writing these lines, and yet, that is the characteristic of a great movie. A film that makes you look back and think.
Is she a siren? And her beauty. A Celeste Dalla Porta perfectly cast for this role. You would look at her and think beauty is objective after all. How could even Odysseus resist that stare? "What are you thinking about?"
She is young, playful, the world is hers, and she doesn't want to just be with one guy, even if that is the love of her life. She is too young and pretty to comply to a social norm.
And yet time flies even for sirens. You suddenly look back and think of your life looking back, once you are old and beauty has slowly faded. Have you made the right choices? And every single choice you have made has led you to where you are now. So many what ifs. What if you had married? What if you had approached that one person, what if you had left your city to follow your dreams? And yet it has all led you there. Maybe in a parallel universe things are so different. "What are you thinking about?"
Maybe for Parthenope the turning point of her life was when she saw her Odysseus depart. All set in a magestic city of Naples, the eternal Meditteranean sea, calm and wise from all those centuries of living history. Because most likely, only the sea that gave birth to Parthenope will be able to decrypt her thoughts, what she is really thinking about.
And isn't that the point after all?
