Stealing Beauty ** (1995, Liv Tyler, Joseph Fiennes) – Classic Movie Review 1501

Co-writer/director Bernardo Bertolucci’s gorgeous-looking but mostly rather obnoxious 1995 Italian-holiday drama has a pretty specious script that largely defeats an exceptionally talented, very special cast.

Liv Tyler stars as a pubescent young American girl, 19-year-old Lucy Harmon, who, after her mother’s suicide, is despatched to a hilltop farmhouse in Tuscany to stay for the summer with some cynical and infuriating British ex-patriate family friends enjoying the last drop of the pleasures of Chiantishire.

She is there, ostensibly, to have her portrait done by her host, Irish artist Ian Grayson (Joseph Fiennes), but she has two hidden agendas. She hopes to be reunited with her first love, a boy (Robert Zibetti) she met there four years earlier, and to unravel the mystery of her paternity. Clues in one of famous poet mother’s poems indicate she was conceived during a summer at the farmhouse by one of the bohemian crowd now gathered there 20 years later.

Bertolucci’s film is okay as a holiday movie snapshot of a lovely vacation for the handsome and talented performers, who are game for all its trite and steamy goings-on. The cast and Darius Khondji’s photography of the breathtaking Tuscan countryside are the film’s two main saving graces.

Husband and wife Jeremy Irons and Sinead Cusask, Donal McCann, Jean Marais, Rachel Weisz, D W Moffett, Stefania Sandrelli and Jason Flemyng also grace the cast.

It is rated R for strong sexuality, nudity, some drug use and language.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1501

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Bertolucci and Tyler.

D W Moffett.