STEALING BEAUTY
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Liv Tyler, Jeremy Irons, Sinead Cusack, Donal McCann, Rachel Weisz, D. W. Moffett, Carlo Cecchi, Stefania Sandrelli, Roberto Zibetti. Screenplay: Susan Minot. Director: Bernardo Bertolucci. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Bernardo Bertolucci's STEALING BEAUTY opens with a point-of-view video sequence focusing on the journey of 19-year-old American Lucy Harmon (Liv Tyler) via plane and train to Tuscany. As she steps off the train in Tuscany, Lucy hears a man call to her, and sees a hand bearing a unique bracelet drop the videotape he had just taken out a window of the train. A bit of mystery is established: who is the man in the bracelet, and why was he following Lucy? It is a clue to what is wrong with STEALING BEAUTY that, though the man appears again, his behavior on the train is never explained, or even addressed. This is a film of false starts, dead ends and pointless distractions which pays too little attention to what should be its central premise.
Tyler's Lucy is traveling abroad for a couple of very distinct reasons, we learn. Returning to the estate of sculptor Ian Grayson (Donal McCann) and his wife Diana (Sinead Cusack), family friends with whom she had vacationed five years earlier, virginal Lucy hopes to find the Italian boy (Roberto Zibetti) who gave her her first kiss, perhaps to share another first. She also hopes to find the meaning behind the final entry in her late mother's diary, which hints at a special connection to the Graysons' place. Lucy befriends several other guests at the Graysons', including terminally ill author Alex Parrish (Jeremy Irons) and Diana's free-spirited daughter Miranda (Rachel Weisz).
They are not the only guests at the Grayson residence, which appears to be a kind of expatriate artist's Hotel Algonquin. Other regulars include Noemi (Stefania Sandrelli), an advice-to-the-lovelorn columnist; Richard (D. W. Moffett), an American entertainment lawyer and Miranda's lover du jour; and M. Guillaume (Jean Marais), a slightly dotty old poet. Most of them are given some kind of romantic sub-plot -- just enough, in fact, to be genuinely annoying. Bertolucci repeatedly cuts away in the middle of a scene to an irrelevant tangent, or introduces characters for a few superfluous moments. In one scene, an army lieutenant (Leonardo Treviglio) has his car break down near the Graysons, and ends up joining them for dinner; in another, Lucy's dance with an older gentleman (Carlo Cecchi) is interrupted by a drunken, jealous woman who promptly urinates on the floor.
All this activity might suggest that Bertolucci simply wants to revel in the Bohemian lifestyle of the artistic types who populate the Grayson estate, except that he plays Lucy's quest for her mother's past and the illness of Irons' Alex so seriously. It is as though he is afraid that with all the drinking, dancing and baring of breasts going on, we in the audience will forget that there are also Serious Issues to be addressed. The problem is that it is always clear which of Lucy's two missions is of greater interest to him, to the other characters in the film, and probably to us. There's nothing wrong with a simple, erotic coming-of-age story, but Bertolucci appears to be embarrassed at the thought of making a film which is about something as base as the loss of virginity. Consequently, he piles on the characters and the distracting editing to provide the illusion of substance, when in fact he is ready to end his story as soon as Lucy is de-flowered.
It's truly a shame that Bertolucci was unwilling to focus on that one story, because it provides a few touching moments. Liv Tyler, who has improved exponentially as an actor since her debut in SILENT FALL, is a radiant presence at the center of the story. She makes the best of the sketchy relationship with her poet mother through her own abortive attempts at verse, and shares some appealing scenes with Irons (in one of his least mannered recent performances), including one where she reveals her sexual inexperience. That revelation finds its way to the other guests, leading to an effective and poignant sequence in which Lucy, in an attempt to convince everyone that she finally has a lover, picks up a drunken young man at a party and makes a point of being seen kissing him and taking him to her room, where she then watches him pass out in her bed. There are moments like that when Lucy is every bit as beguiling as everyone in STEALING BEAUTY seems convinced that she is, but Bertolucci still carries on as though he is above it all. By trying to turn STEALING BEAUTY into something deep, he muddles it. He also makes that voyeuristic opening video sequence all the more telling. Instead of watching his character's life unfold, he tries to catch it out of the corner of his eye, without letting anyone else know that he's looking.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 beauties and their breasts: 4.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University http://www-leland.stanford.edu
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews