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Parthenope review — soft porn and not much else

Parthenope review — soft porn and not much else

Times08-05-2025
Paolo Sorrentino, the Italian writer-director who gave us such playfully profound dazzlers as The Great Beauty and The Young Pope, has degenerated into embarrassing soft-porn perving in a film that purports to chart 75 years of a woman's life but focuses pretty much exclusively on her nubile years.
Parthenope, played for most of the film by Celeste Dalla Porta, is as gorgeous as the Neapolitan scenery in which Sorrentino plonks her. The director certainly thinks so, lingering lasciviously on her bikini-clad form in scene after scene. It's two fingers up at #MeToo and a baseball bat to his reputation.
This is a film that strives desperately for beauty, sensuality and philosophical depth and only sporadically achieves the first of those. Even the beauty
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Gregg Wallace: Ex-MasterChef host 'sorry' but says he's 'not a groper'

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