Was 2025 the best movie year of the century thus far? Perhaps I am suffering from recency bias, but Parthenope is a new pillar of the case for 2025 and possibly the most misunderstood. The critical consensus–that it’s a glorified perfume commercial, a pretty but empty exercise in the male gaze–misses the point entirely, and I think willfully so. Takeaways below.

• The movie works more like a poem than an essay. It doesn’t argue a thesis so much as it arranges a series of intensely beautiful, intensely sad scenes and then forces them into juxtaposition through recurring refrains and motifs so that you start to see the variations on the theme even before you can articulate the theme itself. My personal favorite is that nearly every male character at some point asks Parthenope: “What are you thinking about?”–proof, in most cases, that what they are seeking to grasp is precisely her subjectivity, no matter how much they appear to objectify her (more on that later).
  
• Parthenope is told, over and over, that her beauty gives her power, that it opens doors. But the doors it opens never lead where she actually wants to go. She is endlessly desired, but the desire of others becomes a kind of trap: in Lacanian terms, she functions as the objet petit a (the object-cause of desire) for nearly every man around her. Nobody is fulfilled by knowing her or possessing her. That’s the whole point and exactly what makes the film about desire broadly writ, not just the male gaze. And the cost of being everyone else’s object of desire is that she struggles to form her own desires–in other words, to access her own subjectivity.
  
• There is a version of this reading that reduces to a feminist critique, and it’s a perfectly valid one. But I think the film is doing something more ambitious. Parthenope’s inability to know what she desires for herself–to commit to a life-project, to build something durable–is not uniquely a consequence of gendered objectification. It is the structure of desire itself, which for Lacan is always constituted by lack and always mediated through the desires of others, meaning that the difficulty of knowing what we want is not a personal failure but a structural feature. The gendered objectification is one specific instantiation of this universal problem: that we are all, to some degree, shaped by what others want from us, and that the gap between our desire and our ability to name it is permanent. Neither reading cancels the other, and the movie is richer for supporting both.
  
• In some ways, Parthenope is like the high school quarterback in a small town who’s told one too many times that “these are the best days of your life.” He starts to believe it. He prioritizes the immediate, the aesthetic, the glory of Friday nights, at the expense of grades, durable relationships, and other things that will matter once the applause stops. Parthenope is the same. She values beauty and adventure, perhaps too much, not because she’s shallow but because everyone around her has relentlessly confirmed that this is where her value lies. She internalizes the script, but then she ages out of desirability and is left adrift in middle age. There is a broader lesson here: you always think you can hang onto beauty like a scrapbook, that you can bank experiential or aesthetic wealth. But beauty and impermanence are inextricably related, and rather than filling your coffers, aesthetic experience spits you out on the other side with very little, except maybe a heightened awareness of the emptiness of the quotidian. This is not to say that aesthetic experience is worthless, but Parthenope’s tragic flaw is the exclusivity of her pursuit of the beautiful and the immediate.
  
• Professor Marotta is the ethical heart of the film. He has an ill son, and this single non-negotiable commitment structures his entire life. He sacrifices freedom, pleasure–nearly everything–for this responsibility. The last image of him, lying in the fetal position on a cot in his son’s room, is one of the saddest and yet most contented images I’ve seen in a movie. He made his call, he took his shot. He committed in a way Parthenope never quite managed to. There is a kind of freedom within the acceptance of constraint–a leap into the ethical that gives life shape and coherence, even at great personal cost. Kierkegaard would say Marotta’s commitment is authentic precisely because it comes without guarantee of happiness or reward. He doesn’t need the outcome to justify his choice. The commitment itself is the justification.
  
• Cardinal Tesorone is his exact foil. He has formally committed to the ethical–he has taken vows, accepted a sacred position, etc.–but he lives entirely in the aesthetic register, using his symbolic authority as cover for pure sensual indulgence. He is worse than someone who simply lives aesthetically because he claims ethical authority while refusing the responsibility it entails. The most disturbing part of the movie is that he faces no comeuppance whatsoever. Of all the characters, he actually comes closest to “possessing” Parthenope. The world of the film doesn’t enforce the ethical demand. Tesorone can refuse it and get away with it entirely, which only makes Marotta’s acceptance of it even more remarkable.
  
• My favorite feature of the movie is its amoral quality. Much like a Shakespeare play, it seems to exercise remarkable restraint in passing judgment on any of its characters. I genuinely don’t think there is a moral to this film, but if one wants to infer one, it could be this: If you’re going to eschew the banal in favor of adventure and beauty, you have no right to regret the instability and unrest that come with it. If you always strive to make yourself unique, independent, exceptional, in some ways you have no right to feel lonely. And similarly, if you choose a more stable path, you have no right to feel trapped in the mundane. Parthenope occupies the worst of both worlds: she never quite commits to the aesthetic life fully enough to own it, and she never faces an absolute demand that might have forced her into the ethical. Everything is presented to her as choice, as an option, as freedom. And that very freedom may be what prevents her from ever achieving an authentic subjectivity, though the movie remains somewhat ambivalent on this point as well.

Overall, a really captivating and thought-provoking movie. In addition to the philosophical complexity, the movie is heavily inflected by the post-WWII Naples setting throughout, the appreciation of which was greatly enhanced by my having read Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. The two works set in the period have a ton in common: an older generation longing for the restoration of order and willing to weaponize the younger generation to bring it about, justifying its ruthlessness by pointing to posterity. If you liked one, you’ll like the other.

Rating: 9/10. Ignore the critics on this one. Sorrentino is doing something they’re not ready for.