Product Details

• Actors: Jeremy Irons, Liv Tyler, Carlo Cecchi, Sinéad Cusack, Joseph Fiennes
• Directors: Bernardo Bertolucci
• Writers: Bernardo Bertolucci, Susan Minot
• Producers: Chris Auty, Jeremy Thomas, Yves Attal
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, HiFi Sound, NTSC
• Language: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: 20th Century Fox
• VHS Release Date: February 3, 1998
• Run Time: 118 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (110 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6304195281
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #286,969 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Critics were decidedly mixed about this 1996 drama from Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, and the movie enjoyed only a brief theatrical release. Now it's best known for its early appearance by Liv Tyler as a 19-year-old beauty named Lucy who summers at a villa in Tuscany with a variety of artistic types who immediately respond to her inspirational innocence. An amateur poet who has decided it's time to lose her virginity, Lucy has come to Italy after the death of her mother, who visited this artist's refuge 20 years earlier. Several young Italian men find Lucy quite heavenly (she is, after all, Liv Tyler), and she's not immune to their attentions, but she'd rather spend time with a playwright (Jeremy Irons) who is dying of AIDS and therefore has something other than sex on his mind. The movie's plot is about as substantial as Tyler's character (she's sexy, all right, but hardly an intellectual muse), but Stealing Beauty creates a serene mood that's so soothing you'll want to book a flight to Tuscany immediately, just to soak up the setting's idyllic atmosphere. If you're in the right frame of mind, this movie is like a balm for the soul, and Tyler and Bertolucci can share the credit for making this two-hour vacation so charmingly relaxing. --Jeff Shannon

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

105 of 119 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Italian beauty, March 23, 2002

By 

D. Roberts "Hadrian12" (Battle Creek, Michigan United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Stealing Beauty (DVD)

This is an artistically well-done movie if there ever was one. In fact, I don't think it would be going too far to call it Bernardo Bertolucci's best movie.

The film centers around an American girl (Liv Tyler) who travels over to Italy to visit her relatives. While there, she gains the friendship of an older writer (Jeremy Irons) who is dying of cancer. Tyler exudes a youthful, natural and yet mysterious beauty which complements Irons' masculine, distinguished screen-presence quite nicely. In many sequences, Tyler is photographed so elegantly that she appears to be a model for one of Boticelli's paintings.

Juxtaposed with this bonding is the desire for Tyler's character to lose her virginity. In this rite-of-passage, her dying friend becomes her mentor. They both want it to be "special," but she is also tempted to just "do it" with the efficacy of becoming a complete woman.

As the cover of the DVD shows Liv Tyler nude, a lot of guys are probably wondering if this is a movie in which she actually bares anything. The answer is......yes! There are a few brief scenes in which she is topless. To my knowledge, this is the only film in which she appears nude.

Filmed on the sun-drenched verdant rolling green countryside of Italy, the movie is colorfully illustrated by vibrant contrasts of red and green. The cinematography goes a long way towards giving the story a distinctly Italian flavor.

So, if you're Italian, like Italian stuff, enjoy aesthetically pleasing films, admire Jeremy Irons or have a crush on Liv Tyler, this movie is for you. If none of these things appeal to you, this probably is not a DVD for you.

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars still one of my favourite movies, March 19, 2005

By 

Judu (don't be so serious) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stealing Beauty (DVD)

The first time I watched this movie I was about seventeen. And from my considerably naïve 17 year old perspective this seemed like a deeply engaging, very interesting and ultimately romantic movie. Though I was not oblivious to the juxtaposition of things traditionally romanticized with less than romantic realities, I was largely distracted by Lucy's own journey to give anything else much thought. It was likely the first time that I saw a well developed character like Lucy who wasn't the confident bubblegum type of romantic heroine that I was accustomed to seeing. Perhaps that says more about the movies I was watching at the time than anything else, but Lucy's imperfections and awkwardness resonated with me and "Stealing Beauty very quickly became one of my favourite movies.

Last Sunday, almost ten yeats later, I sat down to watch it again.

I am more aware now of the interesting and at times somewhat fetishistic ways in which Lucy's virginity was treated by the men and women around her. This is just a personal opinion rather than a critique; but there's an interesting ugliness in the men's reactions to Lucy that is more pronounced now that I watch it again. I'm much more interested in the way that characters like Chris, Alex and Nicolo react to (and take advantage of) Lucy (and the idea of Lucy) as well as Lucy's responses to them. And I think that such interesting complexities are a credit to the way that Bertolucci tells his stories as a director. Though I see it differently now, Stealing Beauty remains one of my favourite films.

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful film, May 29, 2002

By 

"devilcakes" (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stealing Beauty (DVD)

After a trio of exotic disappointments (The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky, Little Buddha), director Bernardo Bertolucci teturned to his native Italy for the first time in fifteen years with Stealing Beauty. The result is his most intimate film since Last Tango In Paris, a coming-of-age tale in which 19-year-old Lucy Harmon (Liv Tyler) travels from America to Tuscany to spend time with family friends following her mother's suicide. She has a couple of ulterior motives for taking the trip--to discover the real identity of her father and lose her virginity to Niccolo, an Italian boy who was her first love as a young teenager.

The story is a flimsy construct but it's well supported by Tyler's appealing, open performance, some sharp playing from Jeremy Irons, Donal McCann and Sinead Cusack, and Darius Khondji's supple, deep focus photography. Bertolucci relies a little heavily on music cues to telegraph emotions but he's in full control of this subtle tale, which proceeds in a languorous daze to a tender and touching close. There are those who still bemoan the director's forsaking of political themse to concentrate wholly on the personal, but the film-making skill and the understanding of the human heart apparent in such films as The Spider's Stratagem and The Conformist are still very much in evidence here. It may focus on the soul rather than the state, but Stealing Beauty feels just as important as anything Bertolucci has made in the past.