Stealing Beauty. - movie reviews

National Review, July 15, 1996 by John Simon

IN 1972, well before its commercial release, Pauline Kael pronounced Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris the film that made "the strongest impression on me in almost twenty years of reviewing. This must be the most powerfully erotic movie ever made, and it may turn out the most liberating," she wrote. "People will be arguing about it, I think, for as long as there are movies." When did you last hear people arguing about Last Tango? If it is remembered at all, it is for Marlon Brando's use of a stick of butter to bugger Maria Schneider with.

From his first feature, The Grim Reaper, and first succcs d'estime, Before the Revolution, Bertolucci looked to me like a three-lira bill. There was less to his films than met the eye, and much less than warranted the ooze of ohs and ahs. To be sure, he has carried pretentiousness to new heights, remotely basing his films on prestigious writers' fictions: Before the Revolution on Stendhal, the nonsensical Partner on Dostoyevsky, the equally impenetrable The Spider's Stratagem on Borges (who told me he had never heard of this movie that proudly displayed his name), The Conformist on Moravia, The Sheltering Sky on Paul Bowles (though, as David Thomson remarked, "he hardly seemed to notice the terrible darkness waiting beyond Paul Bowles's bright sky").

Of all these, The Conformist, which bore some resemblance to its source, was the best. Other films which Bertolucci, sometimes with collaborators, wrote himself were worse; thus Luna and Little Buddha, two of the biggest crocks made by an allegedly major filmmaker. The Last Emperor did have some merit, partly because of the exotic and picturesque milieu, and partly because Bertolucci, like some other perennial amateurs, knows how to pick the right camera man to do most of his work for him. For a long time, it was Vittorio Storaro; in the current film, it is Darius Khondji (Before the Rain, Seven).

What characterizes the work of this Marxist (or ex-Marxist) attitudinizer who has always been a solid bourgeois is a certain rivenness, an unsureness that often amounts to hysteria. As Robin Wood noted, "The split is not merely thematic (hence under the artist's control): it manifests itself at every level of his filmmaking." I am all for complexity and ambiguity, for raising difficult questions rather than disbursing easy answers, but I am not for nudging us toward sleazy revelations and then evading them. With hardly any exception, Bertolucci's films hint at, hover around, or briefly dip into homosexuality and lesbianism, but this ostensibly heterosexual filmmaker making purportedly heterosexual films has never faced the issue squarely.

Stealing Beauty, from a story by Bertolucci, was written by the American novelist Susan Minot, who spent 18 months on it in Italy with the director, though the sketchy, haphazard end result suggests something more like 18 days. It is one of those films called Chekhovian, a term that is sadly turning into a euphemism for boring. An English couple, Ian and Diana Grayson, inhabits a sprawling, romantic hilltop villa in the Chianti country between Florence and Siena. He is a sculptor; she is a homemaker, and in twenty years has turned their home into a museum. Not only are Ian's sculptures and drawings (the undistinguished work of Stephen Spender's son, Martin) all over the place, but also every conceivable artifact and object di virtu litters every nook and cranny, and most of the space in between.

Outside, there are painterly Tuscan landscapes for the camera to scan day and night. Inside, there are equally colorful house guests: Alex, a minor British playwright, is genteelly awaiting imminent death from cancer; Richard, a married American show-biz lawyer, is alternatingly copulating and quarreling with his likewise married girlfriend, Miranda, the Graysons' elder daughter, a jewelry designer. Christopher, her husband, is traveling about with his companion, Niccolo; midway into the film, they return.

"Those naughty boys," says Diana. "I'm sure they are being very naughty."

"I'm sure," retorts Miranda, "they've gone beyond naughty by now."

Noemi, an attractive middle-aged lonelyhearts columnist, is carrying on with a much younger fellow, and is furious when he makes her read Benjamin Constant's Adolphe, where such an affair ends badly. M. Guillaume appears to be Ian's powerful former art dealer; now old, he lounges about forlornly, uttering portentously vacuous apercus in French, e.g., "There is no love; there are only proofs of love." Also around is a neighboring landowner and lecher, Carlo, whose son is Noemi's lover. Whether I have got all these relationships right is doubtful: of the three reviews of the film I have read, two got some of them wrong, the third confessed to total confusion. Blame Bertolucci's sloppiness.

Finally, though, it all centers on 19-year-old Lucy, a visitor from America. Still -- and given her background, highly improbably -- a virgin, she has come to the villa on a dual mission: to revisit the boy who gave her her first kiss five years ago, and to find out more about her dead mother, who spent much time here and may have conceived her by a man other than her husband. Mother, we are told wholly without irony by Alex, "was the best-dressed poet, writing transporting little verses between fashion shoots." In America, she married a poet five inches shorter than herself --the kind of meaningless detail Bertolucci likes to regale us with.