Cinema
Stealing Beauty (15, selected cinemas) Phenomenon
(PG, selected cinemas)
Topless in Tuscany
Mark Steyn
I'd hoped Stealing Beauty might be a sequel to Sleeping Beauty, in which only the Prince's kiss can halt her kleptomaniac rampage. But we should be so lucky. Instead, it's yet another of those pictures where the leading lady takes in the topog- raphy while taking her top off graphically. This time, it's the Tuscan countryside around Siena, whither the coltish Lucy, played by teen-queen Liv Tyler, has repaired for the summer to fmd her father and lose her virginity. In the old days, they said 'See Naples and die'; now, it's Siena and Liv. Naturally, as in the Hugh Grant Sirens, this tale of sexual awakening takes place at the home of an artist — an Irish sculptor whose statuary I'd assumed was intentionally awful, at least until the final credits, which suggest the film-makers see it as real art. There is also a dying English playwright played by an emaciated, cadav- erous Jeremy Irons with a drip-feed (that's
Dad — can you read me my results.' a prop, not his prompter) and a knitted cap of the kind OJ is inclined to favour for noc- turnal walks. `Lucy, Lucy, Lucy,' he sighs, lasciviously yet languorously.
'Lucy, Lucy, Lucy' is about the least un- precious line in the picture. The remote Tuscan farmhouse is a hotbed of creativity — that's to say, there's an Italian gossip columnist, a French art dealer and an American entertainment lawyer. In an Agatha Christie, they'd be bumped off one by one, poisoned by the mozzarella salad, stabbed by shards of Chianti bottles. But this is Bernardo Bertolucci, and he seems to have in mind something closer to Harold-Acton-goes-Club-Med. So it's all talk but no Acton: instead, everyone lounges around the pool nude and remi- nisces about Liv's late mom. `She was the best-dressed poet,' sighs Irons, languid as linguini. `I think it would be great to sit around all day and express yourself,' says the entertainment lawyer. Every so often, a minor character wanders by and says some- thing decorative in French or Italian. 'II n),, a pas d'amour,' snorts the old art dealer. All around, cicadas chirrup, olive trees shimmer lazily in the haze, and the assem- bled menfolk simmer like tagliatelle on low heat, as the extra virginal Liv foils their advances.
The identities of both her eventual deflowerer and her father are obvious from the start, and thereafter the film dribbles away. There's a fair amount of marijuana and a hint of decadence with the brief appearance of a woman who gives golden showers to some local count. What's more striking is that this is the only distinctively individual taste accorded to any character in the film. Everything else seems to be the kind of good taste you can order in from any Sunday newspaper lifestyle supple- ment. The music, for example, is Mozart and John Lee Hooker, Billie HollidaY singing 'I'll Be Seeing You' and Nina Simone's version of `My Baby Just Cares For Me'. Somehow, these choices are all too obvious, as if someone's just stuck on a K-Tel Top 20 Tuscan Patio Picks compila- tion album. For those of us unpersuaded bY the merits of summers in Chiantishire, the film offers subtle support: like the house guests, the cultural references seem to have been plucked at random from around the globe; whatever their individual merits, piled together and dumped in the middle of the Italian countryside, they seem like cheap and meaningless effects.
The one exception is the opening sequence, shot on video like a Generation X slacker movie and accompanied by Hole, a beat combo with whom most Spectator readers are unlikely to be familiar. It estab- lishes Liv Tyler's character as someone seen through others' eyes — through the dying lust of Jeremy Irons or the fumbled efforts of younger men. On the passivity of her face are projected a multitude of feel- ings. The film's title appears elsewhere, too: the countryside's beauty is also being
stolen, by hookers on the autostrada and a huge eyesore of a television antenna which the ex-pats all deplore. But Bertolucci is content to let these ideas just hang in the air, and the film fades away like high-class mood music.
On the evidence of Phenomenon, the John Travolta come-back phenomenon may have had its day. It's supposed to be this year's Forrest Gump, but TravoIta is more idiot than savant — a small-town auto mechanic who, after a blinding flash of light, is puzzled to find he has boundless energy bursting out of him. You need some Vigorous sex, I found myself thinking, but, in this respect, his luck doesn't change until the very end of the picture. Too late.
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