After the death of her mother Sarah, nineteen-year-old American Lucy Harmon (Liv Tyler) is sent by her father to Italy, to stay with some friends who live in the gentle setting of Chiantishire, where she becomes an adult and aware. Shot in the summer of 1995 in a rural residence on the Baron Ricasoli estate in Brolio (Siena), Stealing Beauty can be defined as an intimate thriller and marks the author's return to smaller production dimensions. In the three previous films, elsewhere was identified above all with an exotic and precious geography; here, however, the protagonist searches for it in old Europe and in the sobriety of the Tuscan landscape. The director has stated that he looks at Tuscany "as if it were Bhutan, as if it were a new world seen through the eyes of Lucy, a tourist from a distant country, who is facing the journey that will lead her to transform from a girl into a woman. The landscape reflects the strength and fragility of this passage". The encounter-clash between different cultures is the dominant theme of the second phase of Bertolucci's work, a formal and psychological conflict that we are immediately aware of, when fragments of cinema verite flow before us in sepia tones, as if they were relics of Greek vase painting: parts of Lucy's body sitting on the plane, the pocket guide, a Sienese painting, an Indian miniature. All captured with deliberate and apparent casualness, in medium shot, with the taste of an entomologist of globalization. A shooting style that perhaps comes from the neo-Gothic talent of his new director of photography, the Franco-Iranian Khondji (Seven). However, the chromatic choices do not change and Lucy's path is marked by the red sculptures of Matthew Spender and the leaden olive groves. Bertolucci has an enviable, varied and high-level cast, from Irons to Jean Marais, from Cecchi to Stefania Sandrelli, but the quality of the performers is dampened and sometimes cancelled out by a set design so aestheticized that it becomes oppressive. The author clarifies: «These people live in a rather isolated place, surrounded and invaded by beauty. Not only by the beauty of the protagonist. I am talking about beauty in a more complex sense. The beauty of a landscape that has been the backdrop to many masterpieces of painting from the eleventh century onwards». Aesthetic complacency is perhaps the main flaw of Stealing Beauty, an elegant and too hermetic work that shows clear signs of a creative involution.
