Stealing Beauty (1996)
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci
Lucy Harmon, an American teenager is arriving in the lush Tuscan countryside to be sculpted by a family friend who lives in a beautiful villa. Lucy visited there four years earlier and exchanged a kiss with an Italian boy with whom she hopes to become reacquainted.
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What critics compared Stealing Beauty to
Set in 1983, director Luca Guadagnino’s love story calls to mind another romantic coming-of-age film set in northern Italy: Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1996 epic Stealing Beauty.
“Call Me by Your Name” joins the same continuum of other blissful set-in-Italy American vacation/romance porn such as “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “Chocolat,” “Stealing Beauty,” “Letters to Juliet,” “Under the Tuscan Sun,” etc. Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom knows how to catch a scene so that you can almost feel the temperature in a room, and the subtle shifts between indoor and outdoor light, between humid afternoons and hot clear nights, pass over the screen in an absolutely palpable way.
Compared with Beloved or any number of films dealing with down-to-earth sexual feelings that go wild — whether Last Tango in Paris , Stealing Beauty , Being 17 , or this year’s Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo — Call Me By Your Name is trite.
The world depicted here is so glossily perfect that this feels like a film less about life than about lifestyle—not unlike a similar long-hot-Italian-summer movie, Stealing Beauty by Bertolucci (the subject of a 2013 documentary by Guadagnino and editor Walter Fasano).
Though the same device has been used to treacly results in lesser films — for example, in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty — it has a positively transporting effect here.
The problem is, there's nothing all that obnoxious about Tyler, notwithstanding her performance in Bertolucci's "Stealing Beauty."
While Robert Altman shot Paris as the city of dog poop for his curdled " Ready to Wear " back in the day, Allen and cinematographer Darius Khondji (" Stealing Beauty ," "Seven," " My Blueberry Nights ") give us a Paris that's not quite as shiny as that of " Amelie " but looks scrubbed pretty clean nevertheless:Â the way Paris looks sometimes when recollected by those who love it, as it happens.
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Of course, a film needs more than pretty people disrobing to make it compelling (as Bertolucci proved with "Stealing Beauty", a movie that featured nude scenes involving both Liv Tyler and Rachel Weisz and somehow still managed to be nearly unwatchable) and "The Dreamers" works because the trio Bertolucci has recruited work together so well.
His dynamic approach to the unity of intimate space develops on his similarly enclosed Besieged (1998), a remarkable and deliberate self-reinvention after his years making epics, and the second step in a scaling down that began far more cautiously with Stealing Beauty (1996).
The Dreamers falls into this same category of Bertolucci 's latest odes to sensuality for sensuality's sake like Stealing Beauty and Besieged , a lot of sound and fury with very little significance.
But sticky encounters between ambivalent people in claustrophobic spaces do not automatically make for riveting drama, as seen in Bertolucci's subsequent attempts, such as Luna, Stealing Beauty, and Besieged.
Stealing Beauty's correlations with the later The Dreamers--a ripe lead with bee-stung lips; a moment in which the 19-year-old protagonist nestles a paramour's photograph against an erogenous zone (a gesture Jonathan Rosenbaum called in his review of The Dreamers "the perfect encapsulation of Bertolucci's idea of a turn-on"); scatological punchlines; an unlikely virgin; shock nudity--are numerous and sundry, so much so that one would like to call the newer film an apologia.