‘Parthenope’ Review: Paolo Sorrentino’s Portrait Of An Italian Diva Coming Of Age [Cannes]

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent The Eternal City’s glitterati celebrated Sofia Coppola on Wednesday at an American Academy in Rome gala in the 17th century Villa Aurelia on Janiculum Hill. The Oscar-winning director of “Lost in Translation,” “Marie Antoinette,” “Bling Ring” and, most recently, “Priscilla” was honored with a McKim Medal that “marks the profound relationship between Italy and the United States and recognizes the works of individuals who have contributed to the intense artistic and humanistic dialogue between the two nations,” as a statement put it.

Simon has a strong twitch that drives him to shake his head, meaninglessly. He sometimes dribbles. The way he looks out at the world from under his brows, especially when people are talking to him, suggests he can’t quite keep up with what they’re saying. When he meets a group of young people from a local daycare center for the intellectually disabled, he naturally falls in with them. He befriends Pehuen Pedre (playing a version of himself) on the top of a mountain, where the group has walked and gotten into difficulties in high winds. When they all manage to get down and back on the bus, Simon gets on board with them. This is where he belongs. 

Refresh for latest…: The 77th Cannes Film Festival draws to a close this evening with the prize ceremony about to kick off inside the Grand Théâtre Lumière. The past 10 days have been building to this moment after a somewhat muted start that arrived under gloomy skies. The clouds have since cleared and several films have emerged as potential winners tonight. Scroll down for the list of laureates which is being updated as awards are announced.

Of the many films set in India that premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Payal Kapadia’s feature debut is the only one to focus on the country and its character, which it does by focusing on its most populated city, Mumbai. Like London, Paris and New York, Mumbai is a city of contrasts, a melting pot of castes and races, but of its 12.5 million citizens, over half are likely to live in extreme poverty. All We Imagine as Light tells the stories of the people on the breadline, those who are just about getting by, trying to hold onto their homes and their dignity as the city’s wealthy elite buy up and bulldoze their properties.

“All We Imagine As Light” opens as only a film set in Mumbai can— with the gradual unfurling of this massive metropolis at dawn. Its essential workers begin corralling the huge resources needed to maintain its creaking infrastructure and feed the tens of millions of people who will wake up and take public transport to work.

Being away from home allows room for perspective, and for a group of U.S.-based documentary experts who made the trip to Cannes, the glass remains half full, despite the headwinds. The closure of Participant, Showtime Docs, CNN Films scaling back and belt-tightening across the board have led many to posit that a Golden Age of documentary films has ended. A discussion in the American Pavilion at the Cannes Film Festival begged the question: If the Golden Age is over, what comes next?

Siddhant Adlakha Nostalgic docufiction that morphs into a lockdown thriller, Lou Ye‘s “An Unfinished Film” is the second work at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (alongside Jia Zhangke’s “Caught by the Tides”) in which a “Sixth Generation” Chinese filmmaker has repurposed their old films to create something new. The line between reality and drama blurs as Lou genuinely re-discovers years-old footage, and proceeds to follow a fictitious film crew completing an abandoned project, only for China’s severe Covid-19 lockdowns to interrupt their work, as well as life in all its rhythms.

Lise Pedersen Danish-Spanish co-production “Only On Earth,” by award-winning Danish filmmaker Robin Petré (“Pulse,” “From the Wild Sea”), has picked up the top IEFTA Docs-in-Progress Award at Cannes Docs, the Cannes Film Market sidebar dedicated to documentary film. The film forms part of the Five Nordics Showcase, one of eight showcases presenting a total of 34 docs-in-progress this year. The others include Chile, Scotland, Palestine Circle Women Accelerator, Docs By The Sea, the East Doc Platform, and newcomer Switzerland.

Paolo Sorrentino embraced the stars of his latest film “Parthenope,” including Gary Oldman, Celeste Della Porta and Stefania Sandrelli, as the film received a 9.5-minute standing ovation at Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday night. Tears streamed down the face of Della Porta, who plays the title character, and Sorrentino looked visibly moved as he addressed the crowd. “For me, this movie is a celebration of the journey of my life,” he said.

Oscar winner Paolo Sorrentino ascended the red carpet here this evening for his latest Cannes competition entry, Parthenope, which was welcomed by a nine-minute standing ovation.

Paolo Sorrentino has done a wide range of films but until his most personal, The Hand Of God two years ago (a prize winner in Venice) he had not returned to Naples, the land of his youth except for the very first feature he made, 2001’s One Man Up. Since then though he has been to Cannes with his films 6 times, and his impressive list of movies have included The Consequences Of Love, Il Divo, Loro, and his Oscar winning The Great Beauty. There have been more mixed reactions for his starry English language films as well like Youth and This Must Be The Place, but Italy seems to drive his creative mojo and may be closest to his heart is the current phase of his filmmaking career when he has found new inspiration by going back to his youth, first in The Hand Of God which closely reflected his own coming of age in Naples, and now his latest, Parthenope which reflects the youth he wished he had experienced. Instead he moved away to a whole new career in film (that was indicated at the end of Hand Of God). It had its World Premiere at the Cannes Film Festival Tuesday night.

Siddhant Adlakha A decades-spanning drama about a young woman born in Naples — the hometown of writer-director Paolo Sorrentino — “Parthenope” is an exquisite treatise on cinematic beauty. Chronicling her birth, her youthful teenage summers and the years she spends adrift as a young adult, the film is an intoxicating reflection on the way people and places are seen, and the way they see themselves.

EXCLUSIVE: Paolo Sorrentino‘s anticipated new movie Parthenope has sold around the world for Pathé here in Cannes where the film is playing in Competition.

An hour into “Misericordia,” there is a scene so shocking that it might leave viewers’ mouths agape in disbelief. Only it is a mere conversation between two people.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent A new Italian distribution and international sales company called PiperFilm is launching in Cannes, having scored rights for Italy to Paolo Sorrentino’s Cannes competition title “Parthenope.” Former Vision Distribution managing director Massimiliano Orfei is president of PiperFilm, while Luisa Borella, who is also a former top-level Vision Distribution executive, serves as the new media company’s COO. PiperFilm is adopting an innovative distribution model by striking an agreement with Netflix under which the streaming giant will have the first exclusive post-theatrical window for Italy on their titles, while Warner Bros.

Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva, three times president of Brazil, was born in 1945. He grew up poor in Sao Paulo and left school early to help support his family. Having trained as a lathe operator, he reached a milestone when he became the first member of his family to earn more than the minimum wage. Initially reluctant to get involved in politics, he was president of the steelworkers’ union by the time he was 30, leading a strike that achieved better wages that he saw were soon soaked up by a rise in rents. “It was time for workers to think about ruling their own country,” he says in voice-over in Oliver Stone and Rob Wilson’s documentary, simply called Lula.

CANNES – There is nothing wrong with a three-hour movie. There have been absolute masterworks longer than 180 minutes.

Jessica Kiang That the name Limonov is pronounced Lee-MWAH-nov is one of two main things that Kirill Serebrennikov‘s “Limonov: The Ballad” teaches us about Eduard Limonov, the Russian radical, poet, dissident, emigré, returnee, detainee, bête noire and cause célèbre who in 1993 co-founded the ultra-nationalist National Bolshevik Party. The second is that, as imagined in this adaptation of Emmanuel Carrère’s 2015 fictionalized biography, for all the shifting identities and attitudes he assumed over the course of his controversial life, his persona as an aggravatingly self-aggrandizing solipsist never wavered.

A glowing brain, world leaders lost in the woods, a U.S President with a glaring British accent, oh, and bog men — mummies whose manhood has been severed and wrapped around their necks. Such are the sundries of Guy Maddin, Evan and Galen Johnson’s political comedy Rumours here at Cannes.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Paolo Sorrentino is back in Cannes for the seventh time with “Parthenope,” a love letter to his native Naples but also, as he puts it, a film about his “missed youth” that comes as a natural follow-up to his autobiographical “The Hand of God.” Perhaps more significantly, “Parthenope” – an epic spanning several decades – is Sorrentino’s first female-centric film. Why? “In thinking of a modern hero, it came naturally to me that it would be a heroine, not a man,” he tells Variety. Let’s start with the film’s titular protagonist, Parthenope. Of course, Neapolitans in Italy are also known as “Parthenopeans.” My impression is that, after returning from Rome to Naples to make “The Hand of God,’ your native city drew you further back into its fold. It’s a bit more complex, actually, not necessarily just linked to Naples.