Bertolucci’s ‘Beauty’ Searches for Identity, ‘60s Idealism

When the young American Lucy Harmon (Liv Tyler) arrives at the Tuscan farm where she was conceived two decades earlier, she finds everyone there in the midst of a lazy, mid-afternoon nap. What follows is an awakening in more ways than one.

This opening to Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Stealing Beauty” is as gentle a metaphor as one could imagine, and one that seems to say as much about the filmmaker as the film. “Stealing Beauty,” which follows Lucy on her search for her biological father and on her mission to lose her virginity, marks the 56-year-old filmmaker’s return to his native Italy, following a 15-year voluntary exile, and a return, of sorts, to the kind of intimate, personal journeys taken in his work in the late ‘60s.

Bertolucci has spent most of his years in exile making David Lean-size epics, the brilliant “The Last Emperor,” the dense and emotionally inaccessible “The Sheltering Sky” and the lush, spiritually gimmicky “Little Buddha.”

“Stealing Beauty,” while set against the gorgeous landscape of Tuscany, certainly reduces the size of the canvas and bores in on the lives of familiar characters. The middle-aged English people living at the rural farm are of Bertolucci’s generation, former ‘60s political firebrands living out their utopian dream in a state of perpetual ennui. They’re napping even when they’re not napping.

Bertolucci, working through the fresh innocence of Lucy, wants to wake and shake these people, revive their idealism and former passions. They don’t even have enough of the old fire to combat the TV transmitters that are marching, like carpenter ants, across the horizon, stealing the beauty. But Bertolucci could stand to stoke his own furnace. The script (written by Susan Minot from a story by Bertolucci) suffers from the same tired blood as his characters, and his direction is often ponderously self-conscious.

Still, even a lesser Bertolucci is an event, and “Stealing Beauty” has its charms. Tyler, either because she’s acting well or not acting at all, is convincingly innocent as Lucy, a 19-year-old American typical in every way except for: A) her determination to discover the identity of the lover described in her late mother’s diary, and B) for having saved her virginity for the Italian boy she’d met at the farm on a visit a few years earlier.

The leading candidates for Lucy’s father include artist Ian Grayson (Donal McCann), who has agreed to paint Lucy’s portrait; Monsieur Guillaume (Jean Marais), a flamboyant art dealer; and Alex Parrish (Jeremy Irons), a playwright dying from an undisclosed illness. Lucy’s relationship with Alex, who is uplifted by her presence and eager to assume a paternal role in his final days, is the film’s greatest strength.

It seems pretty obvious that as Alex attempts to inspire Lucy with the values from his generation while preserving the relative innocence of hers, what we’re really hearing is Bertolucci’s lament for the apolitical nature of today’s youth. At a press conference for “Stealing Beauty” in Cannes last month, Bertolucci said his next movie will employ a time machine to set up a direct confrontation between young people of today and their counterparts in 1968.

Meanwhile, we have “Stealing Beauty,” which approaches the same subject from an oblique angle, and with varying degrees of sharpness. That Lucy’s presence would get the blood moving in her mother’s friends--Alex, Ian and Ian’s wife, Diana (Sinead Cusack)--is carried off well enough. But the subplot about Lucy’s withering virginity is an embarrassing miscalculation. Once the mystery of her parentage is solved, all that’s left is when and with whom Lucy will do the deed.

There’s no question where. According to her mom’s diary, Lucy was conceived in the farm’s olive grove. Sometimes, even those who don’t ignore history are doomed to repeat it.

* MPAA rating: R, for strong sexuality, nudity, some drug use and language. Times guidelines: bluntly adult material handled tastefully.

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‘Stealing Beauty’

Liv Tyler: Lucy Harmon

Sinead Cusack: Diana Grayson

Jeremy Irons: Alex Parrish

Donal McCann: Ian Grayson

Carlo Cecchi: Carlo Lisca

A Recorded Picture Company, and UGC Images presentation of a Jeremy Thomas production, released by Fox Searchlight Pictures. Director Bernardo Bertolucci. Producer Jeremy Thomas. Screenplay by Susan Minot, based on a story by Bernardo Bertolucci. Cinematographer Darius Khondji. Editor Pietro Scalia. Costumes Louise St. Jernsward, Giorgio Armani. Music Richard Hartley. Production design Gianni Silvestri. Running time: 1 hour, 59 minutes.

* At selected theaters throughout Southern California.