Paolo Sorrentino has always been obsessed with beauty — its grandeur, its weight, its unbearable lightness.
Parthenope is no exception.
A woman, the Mediterranean, a lifetime suspended between the sun-drenched splendor of Naples and the creeping sense that something has slipped through her fingers.
Did Parthenope just drift past her own Grande Bellezza without realizing it?
Sorrentino crafts Parthenope as an enigma wrapped in silk and shadow.
She moves through decades, through desire, through moments that should feel like everything — but do they?
His cinema is about the unspoken regrets, the choices that look like freedom but might just be another gilded cage.
And here, the question is sharper than ever: when everything is within reach, why does fulfillment feel so distant?
No one shoots parties like Sorrentino. His parties aren’t just excess — they’re rituals, almost religious in their grandeur.
You don’t just watch them, you want to be inside them.
The music pulses, bodies move like divine apparitions, the camera glides in a perfect choreography of seduction and loss.
His parties are both intoxicating and tragic— because no high lasts forever.
And when the music fades, when the night stretches into dawn, all that’s left is the cold aftertaste of something that almost felt real.
Then there’s the cardinal. A beast in silk and gold, a grotesque and magnetic figure straight out of a fever dream.
Not a man of God, but a rockstar in a cassock.
He embodies everything Sorrentino does best — the blurred line between holiness and spectacle, between power and grotesque indulgence.
And this is where Sorrentino succeeds… Pasolini’s critique of power may have been too raw, too direct, and it got him killed. Sorrentino wraps his in a neon-lit masquerade, dressing corruption in something so seductive that it’s almost impossible to look away.
Where Pasolini fought the Church, Sorrentino dances with it — turning its decadence into an opera, its contradictions into spectacle.
Then comes the moment. That gasp. That wow. “The why don’t I own this already?“ moment.
A dress that stops time.
The costumes are signed Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello, and they hit like a thunderbolt. Amalfi Season, but make it truly 2025.
Every single look in this film is a statement — draped silks, razor-sharp tailoring, Mediterranean goddesses reimagined with modern elegance.
It’s not just fashion, it’s styling with a capital S.
The kind of wardrobe that doesn’t just sit in a movie — it invades your brain and makes you rethink your next summer closet.
I don’t know if Parthenope truly lived. What I do know is that by the end, I cried.
Not because the film told me to, but because watching a life unfold — watching it slip away, moment by moment, choice by choice —it’s always brutal to wonder what could have been. To realize that maybe, just maybe, it all could have been different.
But fuck it… That silver dress, barely hanging onto her chest, and the fact that I need one just like it. Maybe that’s all that matters right now.