Paolo Sorrentino’s latest film, Parthenope, is one of the most alluring of his career – and that’s really saying something. It’s about a young woman, the Parthenope of the title, played by Celeste Della Porta, who is born into a wealthy Neapolitan family in the 1950s. Most of the film takes place in the 1970s, when her beauty entrances everyone she meets, turning her into an emblem of the hopes and dreams of Naples as a whole. Sorrentino interweaves Neapolitan history with Parthenope’s various romantic travails, and the various ways she negotiates her beauty, and its impact upon people, over the course of her young adulthood.

While all of Sorrentino’s films have a strong sensuous propulsion, Parthenope sees him rarefy this signature into an extraordinarily erotic lyricism – a desire that transcends sexual orientation. Early on, Parthenope comes across the writer John Cheever, played by Gary Oldman, who draws her attention to “the mystery of beautiful people” before asking her “are you aware of the disruption your beauty causes?” The continuum between beautiful people and their adoring admirers is a hallowed one in Parthenope, and the longing gazes of the men who stare at Parthenope are every bit as much a libidinal spectacle as her own face and body. Amidst such heady tableaux, it’s all the more remarkable that Sorrentino pulls back from his normal hyperactivity to suspend us in the mercurially suspended time of desire that emanates from the body but is not entirely of it. In one of the most gorgeous scenes, Parthenope rests on her balcony, looking over the ocean, as a rowboat of men bobs below her, their gazes fixed on her face. The entire film exudes this aesthetic of suspension, and feels like a structure poised on the brink of a great fluidity, confounding materiality and ethereality to invest the experience of cinema spectatorship with a desire for the body that is not entirely reducible to the body either. Hence the prominent woodwind score, which weaves in and out of the most jettisoned images while never quite discarding its core ingredients of body and breath.

The result is a mythic and mystical eroticism – a paean to the kind of beauty that drove ancient wars, cults and poetry. Eroticism here is more than a mere harbinger of pleasure – it is a repository of time, a portal to the most primal and continual of human experiences. After briefly meeting the gazes of the men bobbing on the rowboat beneath her balcony, Parthenope turns to her brother and asks him what the future might hold. Similar questions recur throughout the film: “How many people have slept here together? What have lovers said to each other on this bed?” The film’s many extraordinary erotic tableaux feel like attempts to visualise the inextricability of time and desire, and the way that one’s sense of time fuels desire, at both microcosmic and macrocosmic scales. Much of the first act plays as a dance, as couples, triples and larger configurations come together and break apart, continually recalibrating the sight lines, visual field and temporal consciousness of every gaze.

Part of what distinguishes Parthenope from Sorrentino’s previous work is the near absence of sex. Virtually the entire film exists at the cusp of consummation, since, as one character puts it, “Don’t you find that desire is a mystery and sex is its funeral?” In place of sex, Sorrentino structures the loose narrative around a series of desires that cannot be consummated. In the opening (and strongest) act the first of these desires comes from Parthenope’s brother Raimondo, played by Daniele Rienzo. Raimondo is deeply in love with his sister, and it often feels like she is in love with him. Their gazes, cheeks and mouths are always on the verge of locking, only for them to fall backwards into water – off a kayak, out of an embrace, from the edge of a diving board, and finally, for Raimondo, from the cliff where he dies by suicide. The second thwarted desire comes from Oldman’s Cheever, who experiences a kind of second-order desire – longing to be sexually drawn to Parthenope’s beauty, but unable to convince himself, as he phrases it, that he doesn’t prefer men instead.

Those contorted double or triple negatives around desire only intensify it. Nothing, Sorrentino suggests, is as erotic as the gaze, and especially the cinematic gaze. For all the lingering shots of Parthenope herself, the gazes of transfixed men are a central part of the film’s spectacle, starting with the credit sequence, which traces the elastic space between women walking down the streets of Naples and the men longingly watching them. Throughout his career, Sorrentino has often framed himself as a kind of descendant of Fellini but here he really nails the homage, and comes close to rivalling the master’s incredible and uncanny ability to draw out the inherent eroticism of the camera lens. Like Fellini, the ostensible heterosexuality of it all collapses into a more ambient aesthetic of cruising, most memorably on a silent summer morning when Raimondo comes across Cheever sitting alone in the middle of the Piazza. As the two men lock eyes, they recognise in each the pang of thwarted love, be it incestuous or homosexual, and that vision of his frustrated future leads Raimondo to suicide the same day.

This suicide marks a considerable shift in the film’s tone and palette. The synergy between desire and time remains but it moves into a more muted and morbid register as the action gravitates towards urban Naples, leaving the splendid seascapes behind until the abbreviated third act. This transition begins with Raimondo’s funeral, which sees the family marching down a seaside Neaopolitan promenade, behind a horse-drawn bed-carriage that houses the corpse, but which was initially purchased for Parthenope. Raimondo would often worship Parthenope in just this bed-carriage, using it to keep her at the delicate distance required to ensure his veneration never crossed into consummation. The funeral process is halted, however, by a strange caricature of the coach – an equally grandiloquent vehicle, but with an edge of grotesquerie. For a brief beat the horn-like fountains that crown its roof seem to relegate it to fantasy only for one of the mourners to identify it as a street-cleaner, a harbinger of the cholera epidemic that descends on Naples as a symptom of Raimond’s thwarted love.

From here, the film shifts to two more thwarted desires. The first belongs to Flora Malva, a prominent Neapolitan actress played by Isabella Ferrari, who becomes a mentor to Parthenope. In an effort to retain her beauty, Malva had plastic surgery in middle age, but it ended up disfiguring her, causing her to retreat beneath a veil and avoid leaving her house. Confessing to Parthenope that she hasn’t felt the warmth of another human since her husband died, she asks her to kiss her on the mouth in the steamy discretion of her shower. The second of these convoluted desires comes from Devota Marotto, a Bishop played by Silvio Orlando, who also falls in love with Parthenope. At first it seems like his devotion to Catholicism is in itself enough to thwart his longing, while also forming the vocabulary with which he deflects it. Dressing up in ceremonial garb in the reliquary of his church, he tells Parthenope that “You are the Miracle of San Gennaro.” Even when he gives into his desire, and she agrees to sleep with him, he insists “Don’t be in a rush, one needs to approach slowly,” wearing an absurd swimming costume all the while, as if needing to immerse himself in the oceanic ambience of the film’s desires even or especially in the face of consummation.

For the great twist of Parthenope’s third act is that the Bishop’s desire isn’t thwarted by restraining himself but annihilated by indulging himself. It as if the Catholic focus on abstinence breeds its opposite in him, a determination to consummate at all costs that is over before it has begun. At its climax (if it can even be called that), Sorrentino cuts back to the central relic in the church, the pride of place in the reliquary, as if mirroring the Bishop’s efforts to restore some semblance of mysticism to his desire when the deed is done. The film does the same, cutting abruptly to the most expansive shot of the ocean so far, as if to affirm the power of desire to survive consummation. This sequence distills the aesthetic of Parthenope, a standing wave poised on the brink of not just consummation but abstinence. No wonder the third act is so provisional and unformed – from Parthenope retiring in her sixties, to wandering the streets of Naples once again, to watching a crowd of football fans parading by, her own desire never congeals into marriage, parenthood or even an enduring romantic attachment, remaining as restlessly open-ended as the film’s exquisite sensibility.