Gary Oldman says he had chance to join Cannes drama ‘Parthenope’

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

Oldman plays depressed American novelist John Cheever. The title character, a long-haired beauty played by newcomer Celeste Dalla Porta, becomes inexplicably attracted to him while on vacation.

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.

“At the age of 50, and even older, I was very fascinated by the idea of ​​retelling the sadness, sorrow and hope that the passage of time creates,” he said.

He further added, “And so from there I got the idea of ​​making a long story about a woman from her birth till today.”

Sorrentino said that the evolution of the heroine also coincides with the evolution 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 sometimes known as the Parthenope in reference to the ancient Greek settlement founded there, which was named after a mermaid who, according to legend, drowned herself after failing to seduce Odysseus. And whose body was washed up on the banks of the city.

Newcomer

Sorrentino won best foreign language film in 2013 with “The Great Beauty” and was nominated for an Oscar in 2021 for “The Hand of God,” a personal family tragedy set in 1980s Naples. That film first put the 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 ad,” she told Reuters. After a year or two, she began auditioning multiple times for the lead role of Parthenope, she said.

For Dalla Porta, the film is an allegory not only for Naples, but also 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, I felt like I had to give up the little girl inside me,” she said.

The film’s reception was lukewarm, with The Guardian newspaper calling it a “convenient” film that verged on self-parody. Trade publication IndieWire called it “a superficial meditation on the relationship between youth and beauty”.

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