Stealing Beauty (French: Beauté volée; Italian: Io ballo da sola) is a 1996 drama film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and starring Liv Tyler, Joseph Fiennes, Jeremy Irons, Sinéad Cusack, and Rachel Weisz.
Written by Bertolucci and Susan Minot, the film is about a young American woman who travels to a lush Tuscan villa near Siena to stay with family friends of her poet mother, who recently died.
Stealing Beauty premiered in Italy in March 1996, and was officially selected for the 1996 Cannes Film Festival in France in May.
The main location for filming was the estate of Castello di Brolio, and a small villa on the property.
Lucy, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the recently deceased American poet and model Sara Harmon, arrives at the Tuscan villa of her mom's friends Ian and Diana Grayson.
Other guests include a New York art gallery owner, an Italian advice columnist and a dying English writer, Alex Parrish.
Lucy goes for a swim and finds Diana's daughter Miranda with her boyfriend, entertainment lawyer Richard Reed.
Smoking marijuana with Parrish, Lucy reveals she is a virgin, which he shares with the rest of the villa the next day.
When it's Osvaldo's turn, he demurs, saying, "I don't know which is more ridiculous, this conversation or the silly political one going on over there [at the adults' table]."
It is one of her mother's last notebooks, containing a poem Lucy thinks holds clues to the identity of her real father.
Had Carlo Lisca, a war correspondent friend of the Graysons whom Sara had known, ever killed a viper?
Lucy gets stung by bees as she exits Ian's studio, so he helps, putting clay on the welts.
"[3] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, gave it 2 out of 4, and wrote: "The movie plays like the kind of line a rich older guy would lay on a teenage model, suppressing his own intelligence and irony in order to spread out before her the wonderful world he would like to give her as a gift....The problem here is that many 19-year-old women, especially the beautiful international model types, would rather stain their teeth with cigarettes and go to discos with cretins on motorcycles than have all Tuscany as their sandbox.
"[4] Critics such as Desson Thomson of The Washington Post,[5] Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle,[6] and James Berardinelli of ReelViews gave negative reviews, with Berardinelli in particular, calling the movie "an atmosphere study, lacking characters",[7] and Thompson calling it "inscrutable".
[5] Others, such as Jonathan Rosenbaum of Chicago Reader,[8] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone,[9] Janet Maslin of The New York Times,[10] and Jack Mathews of the Los Angeles Times[11] were more positive, with Rosenbaum in particular praising the movie's "mellowness" and "charm".