A brilliant film that helped define a genre

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Do we leer when we watch films by Bertolucci and Woody Allen? Do you leer? For all their supposed investigation of the celebration of nubile women by middle aged and old men, neither filmmaker quite convinces me that he has quite the interest in these young women that all the artifice, music, flowers, lovely scenery, and other settings suggest. I know that actresses report liking to work with Mr. Allen, as do actors. I am aware that we no longer make that gender distinction but humour me for a moment. Bertolucci has a reputation for pushing actors to full disclosure, as it were. No one discloses anything here.I just saw "Stealing Beauty" for the first time this week during the summer 2012. I find it implausible that a large household of odd mostly male characters would devote a summer contemplating the virginity of a girl. Leering defines, I suppose, a theme for a film as much as any other topic. The loss of virginity seems to me the theme of adolescent films but a bit too much and too little for a film filled with randy old men but these old men seem long past being randy while the young men mostly seem nascent old me without substance.Roger Ebert as usual pins this film in his review. Read it. The men, young and old, lack substance and the nubile girl never becomes a person. Woody Allen usually suggests that the object of desire is a human being and an engaging one at that. Bertolucci does not bother. I rate his film highly because here Bertolucci perfects his leering.

Lucy (played by Liv Tyler) is a 19 American girl which travels to Italy after her mother die. She's coming back to a farmhouse where her mother lived once. It's not the first time she's going there, she had been there four years earlier, so she knows almost everyone in the house. She's young, she's beautiful, she's very attractive, but she's also very innocent and… virgin. Every man in the house, from the older to younger, feel her presence and enjoy it, on one or another way, because she's everything but invisible. Her presence is really noticed, but she's not provocative at all. In fact she's very calm and shy. The entire plot is about her, her feelings, people which surround her, and the way she's growing as a woman. It's all that together what makes this movie so beautiful and intimate, because it's a portrait of the fears and hopes, disillusions and happiness, joy and anger of a teenage girl which is having some "feelings" for the very first time.I enjoyed the story but also the settings used, because it's all so peaceful and calm, it's all so quiet in that lost place somewhere in Italy… The cinematography is beautiful and has this "special touch" European cinema use to have, with those little details which turn the movie so truthful and realistic. I like it a lot! About the acting I must say I enjoyed especially two characters and the respective actors who played them. They were the character "Lucy", played by Liv Taylor and "Alex", played by Jeremy Irons. It's especially those two characters which make this story so beautiful to me.To sum up, it's a simple but wonderful movie and another excellent work by Bernardo Bertolucci.

I gotta admit, I had quite high expectations when I bought the DVD of Stealing Beauty, having heard mostly good stuff about the film. So I sat down in front of the screen, expecting a highly emotional, entertaining flick. Boy was I wrong! There were just too many things that didn't seem right in this. I don't even know where to start so I'll just write the first things that come to my mind;The plot. It just went nowhere. Before watching the film, I had an overall idea of the story, in which there was this 19-year old American girl involved, who travels to Italy in order to resolve the mystery surrounding the father she never knew. With a premise as simple as this, I was expecting the director to surprise his audience with a twist in the plot or two. Alas, as soon as I saw the credits popping up, I shouted out loud "so, is THAT it?!" What was the point of all this? What was I supposed to get? Nothing important happened during those 114 minutes. Let's face it, the countryside is fine for resting, but if you don't have a damn good story to tell, it's just a boring setting for a movie.Cinematography is not enough to make a good film. If I want pretty images, I watch a documentary, or here's a better idea, I just take a walk outside. Watching the regular lives of useless country people don't really match my idea of quality entertainment.The characters are another matter. There are simply no characters that you can relate to/show sympathy, because frankly, there's something disturbing about horny, aging hippies. The only likable person is Lucy, then again, that might only have something to do with Liv Tyler herself, rather than her character.Come to think of it, Liv Tyler's the whole reason I forced myself to watch this to the end. 2 stars for casting her.

To comprehend this empty, meaningless drivel, one must accept, as do the characters in it, the premise that Liv Tyler is a veritable goddess of love. Unfortunately, as she is stultifyingly dull, inane, superficial, selfish, coy, and vapid, this is impossible. God only knows why Bertolucci cast her in this role, surrounded by others who can actually act. Not even consummate pro Jeremy Irons can make his fascination with this simpering whiner sound sincere.The story is as banal as she is: teenage Lucy (Tyler) returns to Italy to lose her virginity, dreaming of a sexy young Italian she met at 13. She does not delight in the Tuscan landscape, study art, or learn Italian, which she insists on pronouncing with an excruciating American accent. Lucy lodges with a fatuous English sculpture and family who live the kind of 'bohemian' life only available to the idle rich. The boys are beautiful (young Joseph Fiennes is stunning) and, their hormones raging, are after just one thing.The only thoughtful character is a middle-aged man dying of AIDS (Irons). His inexplicable presence and predicament may have been the director's idea of adding 'weight' to this fluff. He and Lucy become friends, though one cannot grasp why. Perhaps she admires his ability speak in sentences that parse. Her utter self-absorption is forgotten for a moment as he is whisked away to die in a hospital. But as soon as the ambulance is out of sight, pretty, perky, pouty Lucy quickly comes to her senses and returns to the task at hand: giving it up.The only other American in the film is a thoroughly odious entertainment lawyer who, when not on the phone making deals, cheats on his wife at every turn. Being within earshot, she always catches him. He follows her around and grovels.But back to Lucy! She is a relentless tease and remorselessly leads on her paramour. When the time comes, however, she spurns him with one last shrill whine of consternation, and flounces out of the room leaving him decidedly 'blue'.Bertolucci must have been in love to have been this blind.