Bernardo Bertolucci's first film in 15 years to be set and shot in his native Italy, Stealing Beauty is a contrived and obvious picture of Lucy (Liv Tyler), a 19-year-old American spending a summer holiday in Tuscany where she finds her biological father and loses her virginity. The movie is gorgeously lit by Darius Khondji, but there are few other pleasures in this cliche-ridden and rambling yarn.
On arrival in Tuscany Lucy sets out to renew her acquaintance with the local boy with whom she shared her first kiss when she last spent a summer there four years earlier. Her other quest is to solve the riddle left in a diary by her dead mother. During the course of a summer at the Tuscan home of family friends, most of them eccentric, she gets to grips with both guests. The result is a meandering and unconvincing plot scripted by Bertolucci himself in collaboration with the American novelist, Susan Minot.
Accompanied by a grating soundtrack which appears to have been chosen at random from a jukebox, Stealing Beauty squanders the talents of a cast that includes the promising young Tyler, along with Donal McCann and Sinead Cusack as her hosts, Jeremy Irons as an ailing guest of theirs, and veterans Jean Marais and Stefania Sandrelli. The presence of Sandrelli recalls her roles for Bertolucci in the Conformist and 1900, and serves as a reminder, that in his heyday Bertolucci was capable of making far superior films to his recent tepid and overblown international productions.
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