‘Parthenope’ Review: Goddess Worship

“Beauty is like war — it opens doors,” says the middle-aged American writer John Cheever (Gary Oldman) to Parthenope (Celeste Dalla Porta), a statuesque brunette from Naples whom he meets at a resort. It’s southern Italy, 1973, and Cheever (Oldman in a small but memorably melancholic part) strikes up a friendship with her early on in the film.

“Parthenope,” a characteristically decadent drama by the director Paolo Sorrentino, is about all the doors opened by Parthenope’s beauty. At first — when she’s seen primarily in a bikini, lounging by crystalline ocean waters — this means capturing the hearts of male suitors, like her namesake siren from Greek mythology.

Cheever, who in real life spent years traveling around Italy, is one of the few men in the film who is immune to her charms — maybe it’s the booze, or his repressed yearning for men. Or maybe it’s because a woman like her should be admired from a distance as one does a religious icon or marble statue.

If this way of idealizing women sounds painfully retrograde, know that Sorrentino isn’t interested in realism — or political correctness, for that matter. His work (including the Oscar winner “The Great Beauty” and the HBO series “The Young Pope”) is less about people than it is about big ideas: art, desire, religion, and, yes, beauty; the way they shape our lives with an almost mystical power.

Now add to this an enduring fixation with Sorrentino’s native Italy, its past and present, and its contradictions. The country is home to some of the world’s great triumphs — think ancient Rome and the Sistine Chapel — but the director also depicts it as a hotbed of spiritual rot personified by its corrupt leaders. At one point in the film, Parthenope enjoys a dalliance with a monstrous bishop (Peppe Lanzetta), representing a union of the sacred and the profane.