STEALING BEAUTY
A film review by Julian Lim
Copyright 1996 The Flying Inkpot
Directed by: Bernardo Bertolucci Cast : Liv Tyler, Jeremy Irons Produced by : Jeremy Thomas Rating : *** out of ***** Theatres: Shaw Cinemas
Mmm, isn't Jeremy Irons lovely? How he moves, how he talks, how his saliva falls on to the hard rocky ground. His svelte, skeletal frame, his eyes that look at you with impossibly nosy curiosity, the way he sucks with asthmatic ecstasy on a cigarette. He speaks French, he speaks Italian, and he's dying. Could anything be sexier?
Well, there's Liv Tyler of course. She glides through the film beguiling everyone, whether she's in a swimsuit or a horrible frilly dress, whether she's dancing, smiling blankly at social occasions or solemnly writing her diary. And actually, she's pretty good, too. Tyler is a natural at playing the American beauty Lucy Harmon, poised between adolescent gawkiness and adult self-awareness, who comes into an Italian village to stay with family friends.
Lucy is aware of her beauty, flirting with it, toying with her role as the pretty young thing amidst the old, the jaded and the sleazy. Yet she is still in the process of getting used to the attentions of men, and more importantly, finding out what she wants and who she is. A double quest unfolds in the course of the film: one, to lose her virginity, and two, to find out more about her mother's past, perhaps even to discover her true father.
Aiding and abetting her in the first quest is Jeremy Irons, oozing his uniquely foxlike charm out of every dying pore. As an invalid and old person, he plays the part eunuch mentor to Lucy, but his busy probings into her love life are a strange mix of leering, paternal and camp. His interests in her remain ambiguous to the end, when he falls sick and has to be hospitalised soon after Lucy takes a man home.
STEALING BEAUTY could have been an interesting exploration of virginity, innocence and experience. And with its dual search for absent fathers and lovers, it nearly manages an incisive look at how a young woman's identity is dependent on male figures, and on male constructions of the female image (hinted at in the opening scene of a strange man videotaping Liv Tyler sleeping in the train).
Unfortunately, Bertolucci's film touches on these themes but never goes into them with much depth or energy. The search for Lucy's first love never rises much above the level of your typical teen movie. Indeed a film like CLUELESS had a more ironic and revealing take on teen love, poking fun at its conventions even while revelling in them. By contrast, STEALING BEAUTY seems to take all too seriously characters like the sleazy American hunk, the cute-but-insincere Italian, the drunk Englishman, and the truly-sincere-sensitive-shy guy. Does Bertolucci somehow expect us to see this string of cardboard figures as steps in Liv Tyler's voyage of sexual awakening?
Perhaps the problem with the film is that it shares rather too much of the teenager's perspective, with the adolescent's self-absorption and exaggerated seriousness. Hence the 'adult' characters surrounding Lucy never quite take on a life of their own, seemingly spending all of their time thinking and talking about her. Rather than offering contrasting, ironic perspectives on her character, they only seem to indulge her sense of self-importance. And the scenes of Lucy writing in her diary, supposedly our window into her inner life, look like MTV (or, worse, KTV) ballad-sequences, with white handwriting gracefully squiggling across the screen and Tyler's faux-naif girlish voice talking to us (be warned: these contain scenes of graphic teen poetry).
But to carp too much on the shallowness of STEALING BEAUTY is really to miss the pleasures of watching this movie. As in his previous films, Bertolucci excels at providing manifold feasts for the eyes. Here, joined by hipper-than-hip cinematographer Darius Khondji (SEVEN, CITY OF LOST CHILDREN), he gives us lush Tuscan landscapes, beautiful life-size wood sculptures, kisses in a sunset-drenched meadow, Liv Tyler emerging from a pool seemingly chiselled from marble (the pool, that is), Jeremy Irons removing his cap to show a thin veil of grey hair. There are times when the images take on a stunning, iconic flair all their own, as in the scenes of some beguilingly bizarre dancing at a party. It is actually not that hard to lose yourself in the simple charms of this film, to get into the easygoing, gently interested pace of the plot, and to even feel for Liv Tyler as she goes looking for love in all the most photogenic places -- just don't take too seriously the pretensions of the film to being anything complex or profound.
The Flying Inkpot Rating System: * Wait for the TV2 broadcast. ** A little creaky, but still better than staying at home with Gotcha! *** Pretty good, bring a friend. **** Amazing, potent stuff. ***** Perfection. See it twice.>
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