Cannes, France, –

Oscar-winning actor Gary Oldman told Reuters he accepted the chance to star in Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s new film “Parthenope,” even if it was a small role.

“I was anyway. I didn’t even care what it would have been,” Oldman said Wednesday.

Cannes Film Festival

Where the premiere of the competition film was celebrated.

Oldman plays melancholy American novelist John Cheever. The title character, a long-haired beauty played by newcomer Celeste Dalla Porta, is inexplicably attracted to him over the holidays.

Parthenope enchants the men in her life, and the film follows her from her birth in the waters of the Gulf of Naples to her last day before retiring as a professor of anthropology.

Sorrentino said that his own life experiences gave him the idea to follow a character through different eras.

He said, “At the age of 50, or even older, I was fascinated by the idea of ​​retelling the sadness, sorrow and hope that arise with the passage of time.”

He said, “And from there the idea of ​​writing a long story of a woman from her birth till today came to my mind.”

Sorrentino said that the heroine’s development also coincides with the development of the city of Naples.

“Parthenope in the first part of the film, when she’s young, is in tune with the city, those are the two mysteries,” said Sorrentino, who is a Cannes veteran and has brought seven films to compete for the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or.

In the second part, she develops into an independent and spontaneous woman who doesn’t make decisions, which is just like the city, she said at a press conference in the French Riviera resort town.

Naples is also sometimes known as Parthenope, in reference to the ancient Greek settlement established there, which was named after a mermaid who, according to legend, drowned after failing to seduce Odysseus. And whose dead body had washed up on the banks of the city.

Newcomer

Sorrentino won best foreign language film with 2013’s “The Great Beauty” and was nominated for an Oscar for 2021’s “The Hand of God,” a personal family tragedy set in 1980s Naples. That film first put 26-year-old Dalla Porta on the director’s radar.

“The casting agents who had selected me as an extra called me to work in Paolo Sorrentino’s Bulgari advert,” she told Reuters, adding that a year or two later she began auditioning repeatedly for the lead role of Parthenope.

For Dalla Porta the film is not only an allegory for Naples, but also an allegory for his own life.

She said at a press conference with Sorrentino, “Before I started shooting the film I was still in a young, carefree stage of my life, where working was still a dream and becoming an actor was somewhat of an abstract idea. ”

“But during the process of making the film, it felt like I had to let go of the little girl inside me,” she added.

The film received a lukewarm reception, with The Guardian newspaper describing it as a “convenient” film and veering close to self-parody. Trade publication IndieWire called it “a superficial meditation on the relationship between youth and beauty”.

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