I like the Redis solution by @tobyd for some situations. The other option, which is not specific in anyway to Python, would be to structure your script (Python in your case - could be bash, Perl, Ruby) so that it communicates with PHP via STDIN and STDOUT. You can call your script from PHP using exec() and store the results in a PHP variable:
$python_return = exec("script.py {$arg1} {$arg2}");
In the example $arg1 and arg2 are variables in PHP that you want to go into your Python, and $python_return stores what you get back. The return will be a string, so you may or may not need to do some processing on it to convert type on the PHP side. The Python, in this case, has to be set-up to take command line arguments via STDIN and to write the result that you want back to its STDOUT.