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.
Parthenope is just such a film, instigating us to so many questions: what do we think about when our gaze soars; what is it not to use the beauty that you are gifted with, and what price will you pay for that; what is the power of the love when we are young; how do you bear the burden of being smarter than the others and does that make you anomalous or just sad and misunderstood person; whether love, as a means of survival, has failed; when it's time to leave; what the personal freedom turns into when you lock it in a cage.
Still, there are questions that we are not ready to know the answers to, because we have not gone through the suffering, and it alone is the key to awareness.
Parthenope is a sad film where personal freedom is forced to be locked in order to survive and not be killed by the tyrannical, retrograde society that has one main occupation - to judge everyone with the iron hammer of its prejudices and traditions. And in Naples, as we see, there are many of them. A small hell in a seeming paradise where not everyone survives.
To find out what the outcome is for the minority whose emotional intelligence does not conform to public prejudice, watch Parthenope and suffer! The important thing is not to judge anyone, so that you are not judged!
