Stealing Beauty
Bernardo Bertolucci's lyrical coming-of-age drama starring Liv Tyler, Jeremy Irons and the gorgeous Tuscan countryside
After her mother's suicide, 19-year-old American Lucy Harmon (Tyler) travels to Tuscany to spend the summer at a house party hosted by family friends Ian and Diana Grayson (McCann and Cusack) in their romantic hilltop villa. Ian is a sculptor and Lucy has ostensibly come to pose for a portrait. But she has other reasons for making the trip. Twenty years ago her mother spent a lot of time in Tuscany and cryptic clues in her journal suggest that Lucy was conceived there. Now the young woman wants to learn the identity of her biological father and sets about befriending the Graysons' other guests to find out. Sharing the rustic paradise with Lucy are terminally ill playwright Alex (Irons), elderly art dealer Guillaume (Marais), advice columnist Noemi (Sandrelli), jewellery designer Miranda (Weisz) and her buffoon of a boyfriend Richard (Moffett). A more jaded gathering of dilettantes you could hardly imagine. As one of the characters says, "Up here on this hill, the only thing we have to talk about is each other." But the American ing??nue's arrival invigorates the party, especially when it's discovered that she also intends to lose her virginity on the trip. Lucy will have fulfilled both quests by the end of her stay and at its most basic level Stealing Beauty asks two questions: who's the daddy? And which of the local lads is going to get lucky? But as you'd expect from a director of Bertolucci's calibre (Last Tango In Paris, The Conformist, The Last Emperor), there's a more to it than that. Or is there? Few movies can have inspired such wildly disparate critical opinions as Stealing Beauty. Reviewing the film on its initial release, Hal Hinson of the Washington Post wrote: 'The ideas the filmmaker wrestles with in this complex, lyrical motion picture are as rich and penetrating as any he's ever tackled.' On the same day in the same paper, Desson Howe dismissed the film as, 'Bertolucci's hilariously inscrutable exercise in pseudo-profundity.' Another detractor put it more succinctly, suggesting the film should be re-titled, 'The Deflowering Of Liv Tyler'. What no-one can dispute is the fact that Stealing Beauty, photographed by Se7en's cameraman Darius Khondji, looks good enough to eat. You know those daytime TV programmes that search for holiday homes in the sun? Well the Graysons' gaffe is exactly what the punters are dreaming of - a rose-covered, ramshackle villa perched on rolling Tuscan hills where the hour is always golden and the air is thick with lavender and romance. Add luminous Liv in various states of undress and randy abandon and you have a film that makes your average Flake advert seem as dreamily sensuous as a tin of Ronseal. Verdict Dirty old man's pretentious, soft-core fantasy? Or a languid rumination on love, life, art and beauty from one of cinema's most perceptive commentators? You decide. |
