Stealing Beauty

Stealing Beauty (French: Beauté volée, lit. 'Stolen Beauty'; Italian: Io ballo da sola, lit. 'I Dance Alone') is a 1996 coming-of-age drama film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and starring Jeremy Irons, Liv Tyler, Sinéad Cusack, Jean Marais, Donal McCann, D. W. Moffett, Stefania Sandrelli and Rachel Weisz. Written by Bertolucci and Susan Minot, the film is about a 19-year-old American girl who travels to a lush Tuscan villa near Siena to stay with family friends of her poet mother, who recently died. It is an international co-production of France, Italy and the United Kingdom.

Stealing Beauty was released in Italy in March 1996, and was officially selected for the 1996 Cannes Film Festival in May.^[2] It was released in the United States on 14 June 1996.

The film was made entirely in the Tuscany region of Italy during the summer of 1995. The main location for filming was the estate of Castello di Brolio, and a small villa on the property.

Following the suicide of her mother, famous poet Sara Harmon, 19-year-old American Lucy arrives at the Tuscan villa of her mother's friends, Ian and Diana Grayson. Other guests include a New York art gallery owner, an Italian advice columnist and a dying English playwright, Alex Parrish. Diana's son Christopher is due to return from a trip with Niccolò Donati, who lives in a nearby villa. Lucy is eager to reconnect with Niccolò, with whom she shared her first kiss when she last visited the Graysons' villa four years earlier. They briefly corresponded, and Lucy memorised one letter of his in particular. She also hopes to discover the identity of her biological father.

Lucy's father sent her to Italy to have Ian, a sculptor, carve her portrait. While smoking marijuana with Alex one night, Lucy reveals she is a virgin, which he shares with the rest of the villa the next day. Furious, Lucy decides to end her visit. However, before she can book a flight, Christopher and Niccolò arrive, and Lucy is happy to see Niccolò. That evening, Niccolò and his brother Osvaldo come to the Graysons'. After dinner, the youths separate from the adults to smoke marijuana, and they take turns recounting how they each lost their virginity. When Lucy attempts to flirt with Niccolò, she accidentally vomits in his lap.

The next day, Lucy rides a bicycle to the Donatis', seeking Niccolò. She is told he is in the garden, where Lucy finds him with another girl. Upset, she hastily cycles away. When she passes Osvaldo, he calls out to her, but she does not hear him and accidentally falls off the bicycle. Ignoring his offer to help, she rides on. A few days later, Lucy, posing outdoors for Ian's sketch, exposes her left breast. When Niccolò and Osvaldo arrive by car, Niccolò ogles Lucy while Osvaldo looks away. Niccolò follows Lucy into a nearby olive grove, where they kiss, but she pushes him away as he tries to initiate sex with her.

Retreating to the guest house, Lucy reads a poem about her conception from her mother's diary to Alex, believing it holds clues to the identity of her biological father. During her stay at the villa, Lucy has been questioning potential candidates—including Alex, Ian and Carlo Lisca, a war correspondent friend of the Graysons who had a one-night stand with Sara—about her mother, using clues from her diary. Alex denies being her father and encourages her to continue searching for him.

That evening, Lucy wears her mother's dress to the Donatis' annual party. Soon after arriving, she sees Niccolò with another girl, and they do not speak. Later, as Lucy sees Osvaldo dancing with a girl, they exchange earnest glances. She picks up a young Englishman to take back to the Graysons' villa. As Lucy leaves, Osvaldo chases her down, saying he is interested in visiting the United States. They agree to meet the next day. The Englishman spends the night with Lucy at the villa, but without having sex.

The next day, Alex is hospitalised. After noticing Ian's sculpture of a mother and child, Lucy asks him where he was in August 1975, when she was conceived. He says he was fixing up the villa, possibly when he was doing Sara's portrait. He says they could ask Diana, but then remembers she was in London, finalising her divorce. They realise Ian is Lucy's biological father, and she promises to keep it a secret before they embrace.

Shortly afterwards, Osvaldo arrives. Lucy gets stung by bees as she exits Ian's studio, so he applies clay to the welts. As they walk through the countryside, Osvaldo confesses he once sent her an unsigned love letter, which was the letter Lucy memorised by heart. Osvaldo then takes her to the tree he mentioned in the letter. That night, Lucy loses her virginity to Osvaldo under the tree. As they part the next morning, Osvaldo reveals that it was his first time, too.

Liv Tyler admitted she bitterly fought against appearing topless in the film. "Of course the thought of showing your body parts is a terrifying thought – I find it terrifying. Let alone the whole world. And I fought it until the very end."^[3]

1. "2Wicky" (Burt Bacharach) by Hooverphonic
2. "Glory Box" by Portishead
3. "If 6 Was 9" (Jimi Hendrix) by Axiom Funk
4. "Annie Mae" by John Lee Hooker
5. "Rocket Boy" by Liz Phair
6. "Superstition" by Stevie Wonder
7. "My Baby Just Cares for Me" (Walter Donaldson) by Nina Simone
8. "I'll Be Seeing You" (Sammy Fain) by Billie Holiday
9. "Rhymes of an Hour" (Hope Sandoval) by Mazzy Star
10. "Alice" by Cocteau Twins
11. "You Won't Fall" by Lori Carson
12. "I Need Love" by Sam Phillips
13. "Say It Ain't So" by Roland Gift
14. "Horn concerto in D K412, 2nd movement" by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
15. "Clarinet concerto in A K622, 2nd movement" by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Additional songs

• "Rock Star" by Hole was also used in the film. Tyler is shown dancing and singing along to the track, listening with her headphones and walkman.
• Björk's song "Bachelorette" of her 1997 album Homogenic was originally written to be part of the soundtrack and its first working title was "Bertolucci". Björk later faxed Bertolucci to inform him the song would be used on her upcoming album instead.

Stealing Beauty was the third highest-grossing Italian film of 1996 with a gross of $6.5 million.^[4] In the United Kingdom, it grossed £879,695 ($1.5 million).^[5] It had admissions in France of 184,721.^[6] In the United States and Canada, the film grossed $4.7 million.^[7]

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film two out of four, and wrote: "The movie plays like the kind of line a rich older guy would lay on a teenage model, suppressing his own intelligence and irony in order to spread out before her the wonderful world he would like to give her as a gift....The problem here is that many 19-year-old women, especially the beautiful international model types, would rather stain their teeth with cigarettes and go to discos with cretins on motorcycles than have all Tuscany as their sandbox."^[8]

Critics such as Desson Thomson of The Washington Post,^[9] Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle,^[10] and James Berardinelli of ReelViews gave negative reviews, with Berardinelli in particular, calling the film "an atmosphere study, lacking characters",^[11] and Thompson calling it "inscrutable".^[9]

Others, such as Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader,^[12] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone,^[13] Janet Maslin of The New York Times,^[14] and Jack Mathews of the Los Angeles Times^[15] were more positive, with Rosenbaum in particular praising the movie's "mellowness" and "charm".

On the website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 50% based on 50 reviews, with an average rating of 6/10.^[16] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 60 out of 100, based on 20 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.^[17] Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade "B−" on scale of A to F.^[18]

• Stealing Beauty at IMDb 
• Stealing Beauty at AllMovie