What a world Paolo Sorrentino creates. The Italian director called one of his movies – the one that won the Oscar for Best International Film – “The Great Beauty,” but that could have been the title of lots of them, definitely including “Parthenope,” which premiered on Tuesday in the Main Competition section of the Cannes Film Festival.

In this case, the great beauty could be the film’s title character, a stunning young woman named after a mythological siren inextricably linked with the city of Naples. It could also be the world she inhabits, a sun-drenched coastal city on the Tyrrhenian Sea in the Mediterranean. And it could just as well be the aura that Sorrentino’s movies create, languorous and exquisite and, much of the time, gloriously sad.