Stealing Beauty

Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty was one of the movies that I had been longing to see from a long time. Finally, when I laid my hands on the DVD I couldn’t wait to see it… and guess what… it was a great experience…

Stealing Beauty — released in theatres in 1996 — is a homecoming of sorts for the Italian film-maker. It is his first film shot in his native land since the early ’80s. Now, as part of their home video series, Palador has launched the movie’s DVD.

Stealing Beauty is about Lucy, an American teenager, vacationing on a hilltop villa in Italy with a group of her late mother’s artist friends. She wants to reunite with the Italian boy she fell in love with four years ago during her last visit to the villa. However, her main agenda is to find her father. A dairy of her late mother suggests she was conceived on that hilltop. So who could be her father – the Italian war correspondent who wrote to her mother for 20 years, the dying English playwright or the artist who makes sculptures from trees? Amidst all this Lucy also finds it the perfect atmosphere to loose her virginity.

Lucy’s arrival scene in the villa — where her sexual status instantly becomes the main topic of conversation — lingers in memory long after the film is over. “There’s a virgin in the house,” exclaims one of the characters. Lucy’s entry also affects the other women, who are either challenged or reminded of their youth.

American actor Liv Tyler plays Lucy. The film also stars Rachel Weisz (The Mummy) and Joseph Fiennes (Shakespeare In Love) among others.

However, the true star of the movie is Bertolucci himself. The Italian countryside has never looked more alluring as he’s made it look in every frame. Before starting work on this film, for 15 years Bertolucci — the creator of The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris — lived in self-imposed exile from his homeland. During that time, he worked on his ‘Eastern Trilogy’ – The Last Emperor (1987), which won nine Oscars, The Sheltering Sky (1990) and Little Buddha (1993).

Though he is better known for these films, Stealing Beauty remains one of the most complex, rich and penetrating movie he’s ever tackled.