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Stealing Beauty Customer Reviews (16 - 18 of 21 Reviews)

Bertolucci-light
Apparently this was quite a personal film for Bernardo Berolucci who returns to Italy after a 15 year absence. He wanted to view his country from an outsider's viewpoint and so we have a movie set in Italy with hardly any Italian actors. But this may also have been a necessity as 'Stealing Beauty' is the first movie he has made in his home country that doesn't deal directly with politics. The British artists isolation in the loft of the Tuscan mountains symbolises their distance from everyday Italian life.

For this new perspective Bertolucci reincarnates himself as a 19-year old American girl. Much of Lucy's poetry writing moments come from stories Berolucci's father (himself an accomplished poet in Italy) told him about his own past as a young poet. More reality rattled the film-making, as Liv Tyler herself found out when she was 9 that who she thought was her father was not her real father. The man behind the camera at the beginning of the movie who films Lucy on her way to Tuscany has an African braclet on his wrist. This is an indication that the man is in fact the Carlo Lisca character in the film, the war reporter who was one of the lovers of Lucy's mother.

It seems that the most helpful thing that people find with reviews of this film is whether or not certain actresses appear with their kit off. All I can say on that issue is that Rachel Weisz comes away with all the top honours with Liv Tyler an unimpressive second. Great soundtrack

Beautiful film
After a trio of exotic disappointments (The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky, Little Buddha), director Bernardo Bertolucci teturned to his native Italy for the first time in fifteen years with Stealing Beauty. The result is his most intimate film since Last Tango In Paris, a coming-of-age tale in which 19-year-old Lucy Harmon (Liv Tyler) travels from America to Tuscany to spend time with family friends following her mother's suicide. She has a couple of ulterior motives for taking the trip--to discover the real identity of her father and lose her virginity to Niccolo, an Italian boy who was her first love as a young teenager.

The story is a flimsy construct but it's well supported by Tyler's appealing, open performance, some sharp playing from Jeremy Irons, Donal McCann and Sinead Cusack, and Darius Khondji's supple, deep focus photography. Bertolucci relies a little heavily on music cues to telegraph emotions but he's in full control of this subtle tale, which proceeds in a languorous daze to a tender and touching close. There are those who still bemoan the director's forsaking of political themse to concentrate wholly on the personal, but the film-making skill and the understanding of the human heart apparent in such films as The Spider's Stratagem and The Conformist are still very much in evidence here. It may focus on the soul rather than the state, but Stealing Beauty feels just as important as anything Bertolucci has made in the past.

Italian beauty
This is an artistically well-done movie if there ever was one. In fact, I don't think it would be going too far to call it Bernardo Bertolucci's best movie.

The film centers around an American girl (Liv Tyler) who travels over to Italy to visit her relatives. While there, she gains the friendship of an older writer (Jeremy Irons) who is dying of cancer. Tyler exudes a youthful, natural and yet mysterious beauty which complements Irons' masculine, distinguished screen-presence quite nicely. In many sequences, Tyler is photographed so elegantly that she appears to be a model for one of Boticelli's paintings.

Juxtaposed with this bonding is the desire for Tyler's character to lose her virginity. In this rite-of-passage, her dying friend becomes her mentor. They both want it to be "special," but she is also tempted to just "do it" with the efficacy of becoming a complete woman.

As the cover of the DVD shows Liv Tyler nude, a lot of guys are probably wondering if this is a movie in which she actually bares anything. The answer is......yes! There are a few brief scenes in which she is topless. To my knowledge, this is the only film in which she appears nude.

Filmed on the sun-drenched verdant rolling green countryside of Italy, the movie is colorfully illustrated by vibrant contrasts of red and green. The cinematography goes a long way towards giving the story a distinctly Italian flavor.

So, if you're Italian, like Italian stuff, enjoy aesthetically pleasing films, admire Jeremy Irons or have a crush on Liv Tyler, this movie is for you. If none of these things appeal to you, this probably is not a DVD for you.

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