CANNES, France – Gary Oldman jumped at the chance to join Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s new upcoming drama, “Parthenope,” even though it was just a small role, the Oscar-winning actor told Reuters.

“I was anyway. I didn’t care what it would have been like,” Oldman said Wednesday at the Cannes Film Festival, where the competition film celebrated its premiere.

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 mesmerizes the men in her life, and the film follows her from her birth in the waters of the Bay of Naples to her final days 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, “Being in my 50s, actually even older, I was fascinated by the idea of ​​remembering the sadnesses, sorrows and hopes revolving around the passing 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 half of the film, when she’s young, meets the city, those are two mysteries,” said Sorrentino, a Cannes veteran who is set to compete for the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or. Have brought movies. Or.

In the second half, she grows into an independent and spontaneous woman who doesn’t blame others, which is similar to the town, 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 founded 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 star in Paolo Sorrentino’s Bulgari ad,” he told Reuters. She said that after a year or two she began auditioning several times for the lead role of Parthenope.

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

At a press conference with Sorrentino she said, “Before I started shooting the film I was in a young, carefree phase 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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