I was looking for something small and fresh,' Bernardo Bertolucci 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.'
Stealing Beauty stars Liv Tyler 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 is the homesick émigré Diana Grayson, while Jeremy Irons plays Alex Parrish, a dying playwright 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.'
'The most difficult thing was to find the lightness which makes the film very different from my previous movies. Susan [Minot, the screenwriter] 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.' Adam Minns
Prod co: UGC Images
Prod: Jeremy Thomas
Dir: Bernardo Bertolucci
Guión (Scr): Susan Minot
Foto (Ph): Darius Khondji
Art des: Domenico Sica
Prod des: Gianni Silvestre Vestuario
Mus: Richard Hartley
Mont (Ed): Pietro Scalia
Ints (Cast): Sinead Cusack, Jeremy Irons, Liv Tyler
Duración (Running time): 114 min
Ventas (Int sales): UGC International
PROGRAMACION (Screening): 24.00, 19 Sept, Principal; 23.00, 20 Sept, Principal; 23.00, 20 Sept, Astoria 3; 23.00, 21 Sept, Príncipe, 4.
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