What could Bernardo Bertolucci do? After notching up some 16 features in a career spanning over three decades, the 56 year-old director has covered all the big ones: sexuality in Last Tango In Paris; politics in 1900; society in The Conformist; history in The Last Emperor; and the meaning of life in Little Buddha. Moreover, having roamed the Sahara, China and Bhutan for his colossal epics comprising "Oriental Trilogy," it was just time for the Italian maestro to come home.
"I was looking for something small and fresh," he says of Stealing Beauty, a low-budget (relatively speaking) chamber piece set in a Tuscan farmhouse. "I thought it would be interesting to tell the story of initiation to maturity of a girl, and to work against what had become my way of making movies - big productions, historical subjects [which are] existential or religious in treatment."
Released in Italy last March as I Dance Alone, Stealing Beauty stars Liv Tyler (Circle Of Friends, That Thing You Do) as Lucy Harmon, an American visiting family friends after her mother's suicide. While Lucy plans to consummate an old holiday romance with handsome neighbour Nicolo (Roberto Zibetti), the jaded, world-weary household is drawn to her youth and beauty. Sinead Cusack (Waterland, The Cement Garden) is the homesick émigré Diana Grayson, while Jeremy Irons (Lolita, House Of Spirits) plays Alex Parrish, a playwright dying of leukemia who is rejuvenated by Lucy's vitality, and finds the strength he needs to face death.
Lucy's begins her own emotional odyssey when she realises Nicolo sees her as one more notch on his bedpost. Deepening her confusion is a poem by her mother, implying that she was conceived during a summer at the farmhouse and never knew her real father. Drawing on her liberated, enlightened sense of values, and her own inner-strength, she battles to come to terms with change. "She arrives as a girl, and when she leaves, she is a woman," Bertolucci elaborates. "So something has been stolen from her."
Eschewing auteurism, Bertolucci regards the making of Stealing Beauty as a highly collaborative process: "With a film you have to trust to the creativity of everyone on set," he says. "I am more and more convinced that a film is not the work of a single person." The initial story came to Bertolucci while visiting friends in Tuscany, and he developed the screenplay with US novelist Susan Minot, author of the Prix Femina Etranger-winning book, Monkeys.
"Stealing Beauty is the story of an American girl, and it seemed to me natural to seek out an American writer who was also a woman," says Bertolucci, who worked with Minot for over a year on the script. "The most difficult thing was to find the lightness which makes the film very different from my previous movies. Susan is known as a minimalist and I lean more towards Italian baroque and melodrama, so it was fascinating…to work with a screenplay which at the beginning seemed to me to be too economic, and which I then discovered was a screenplay in poetry."
In a so-obvious-it's-brilliant piece of casting, Lucy the young, liberated New Yorker was brought to life on screen by Tyler, the daughter of rock legend, Steven Tyler, Aerosmith's front man. After trawling through 'too many Valley girls' in Los Angeles, Bertolucci met Tyler in New York, and knew immediately she was the one. "I didn't tell her - I had to investigate, but I was very, very confident," he remembers. "If it feels good in the first 30 seconds, then I know I am on the right track."
On set, Bertolucci encouraged the cast to develop their characters themselves. "Every character becomes unpredictable because the real people in front of the camera bring their own experience and their own secrets," he explains. "At the end of filming there is more meat and more blood, and something of the unpredictability of the real person in the character.
"Behind the camera, director of photography Darius Khondji (Delicatessen, Se7en) added new blood, complementing the production design of long-standing Bertolucci collaborator, Gianni Silvestre (The Sheltering Sky, The Last Emperor). Khondji, who shot Se7en as a chiaroscuro trawl through the Devil's own mortuary, proved his versatility by bathing the Tuscan landscape in soft, half light to contrast with Silvestre's deep, intense colours.
"The landscape reflects the strength and fragility of the passage of youth," muses Bertolucci. "I am trying to see Tuscany as I did Bhutan, as if I were experiencing it anew, through the eyes of Lucy, a visitor from afar...this was a cautious homecoming." Adam Minns
Prod co: UGC Images
Prod: Jeremy Thomas
Dir: Bernardo Bertolucci
Scr: Susan Minot
Ph: Darius Khondji
Art des: Domenico Sica
Prod des: Gianni Silvestre
Costumes: Giorgio Armani, Louise Stjernsward
Mus: Richard Hartley
Editor: Pietro Scalia
Cast: Sinead Cusack, Jeremy Irons, Liv Tyler
Running time: 114mins
Int Sales: UGC International
