STEALING BEAUTY (58)

Directed by: Bernardo Bertolucci

Starring: Liv Tyler, Jeremy Irons, Donal McCann

The Pitch: A 19-year-old virgin spends a summer at a remote Italian villa with an eccentric ensemble of artists and hangers-on.

Theo Sez: An odd, melancholy little film, with an endearingly old-fashioned bohemianism about it : it has the feeling of expatriate shenanigans on some Greek island circa 1930, perhaps starring Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller (McCann even has something of Miller's bull-like look) - except that the shenanigans were twenty years ago (it's how our heroine was conceived) and everyone is older now, looking for a way to recapture the spark of youth. The catalyst is of course the virginal (it says here) Miss Tyler, though - as per the title - there's something a little creepy about the way these old bohos draw energy from her : by the end it's no surprise that the idyll is over, even the pastoral setting corrupted, with whores cruising the roadside even as our callow heroine coos that "It's beautiful here". Bertolucci's point seems to be to equate beauty with purity, whether physical (deflowering a virgin is another possible interpretation of the title) or the purity of these characters' carefree, outdated lifestyle, the freedom of a lazy life in a world before mobile phones and Internet chatrooms. It's too sappy to really work - especially when a priggish (but chaste) Italian boy turns out to be the heroine's Mr. Right - but it's no feelgood-fluffy ENCHANTED APRIL either. It's what RULES OF THE GAME might have been like if Renoir had been a soft-hearted romantic instead of a witty, intelligent humanist.