Watch Stealing Beauty For Free

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

All that we are seeing on the screen is happening with real people, real action sequences in the background, forcing the eye to watch as if we were there.

Blistering performances.

All the delightful characters, so well developed, and the mystery sub-plot, perhaps help us old fellers feel not so guilty about watching teen Liv Tyler sport about in short, filmy dresses, or less. Yep, she's gorgeous. But where will this movie go? Will it follow its intrigues and conflicts to their resolutions, and thus show that it is more about story than underwear? As the answer to Juicy Lucy's mystery brings us to further interpersonal conflicts, will these be heeded? Unfortunately not. In the postscript to Lolita, Nabakov defines pornography (very soft, and quite pleasant, here) as successive escalations of eroticism to climax. Ultimately, in Stealing Beauty, that escalation takes over, as the director kills all art-house soap opera with the deflowering of his own movie's purported innocence, and with rather sudden ideal romance. Shouldn't we see a bit more flirtation between Lucy and her true love? As in even this softest porn, the rule is that story and character play second fiddle to sex. Story ends when the sculptor tells Lucy, 'This will be our secret.' He doesn't have to tell his wife! His wife isn't even more strongly driven to return to Ireland. Lucy has to continue to pretend she is merely a visitor. Doesn't she want to tell her sister, "You are my half-sister?" All that gets dropped, for a bit of sim-sex, that is supposed to feel like a climax.Oh, yeah, and the three long-distance shots of the villa: It was a little disconcerting to keep seeing Gladiator Maximus's villa, supposedly in Spain, here in Tuscany. But for a place 2000 years old, it was well preserved.

Lucy (played by Liv Tyler) is a 19 American girl which travels to Italy after her mother die. She's coming back to a farmhouse where her mother lived once. It's not the first time she's going there, she had been there four years earlier, so she knows almost everyone in the house. She's young, she's beautiful, she's very attractive, but she's also very innocent and… virgin. Every man in the house, from the older to younger, feel her presence and enjoy it, on one or another way, because she's everything but invisible. Her presence is really noticed, but she's not provocative at all. In fact she's very calm and shy. The entire plot is about her, her feelings, people which surround her, and the way she's growing as a woman. It's all that together what makes this movie so beautiful and intimate, because it's a portrait of the fears and hopes, disillusions and happiness, joy and anger of a teenage girl which is having some "feelings" for the very first time.I enjoyed the story but also the settings used, because it's all so peaceful and calm, it's all so quiet in that lost place somewhere in Italy… The cinematography is beautiful and has this "special touch" European cinema use to have, with those little details which turn the movie so truthful and realistic. I like it a lot! About the acting I must say I enjoyed especially two characters and the respective actors who played them. They were the character "Lucy", played by Liv Taylor and "Alex", played by Jeremy Irons. It's especially those two characters which make this story so beautiful to me.To sum up, it's a simple but wonderful movie and another excellent work by Bernardo Bertolucci.

Unfortunately the scenery and Liv's looks are the only things good about this film. Pointless plot and go nowhere characters. A day in the life of mundane artist hippies set in Italy. Story, what there is of one, seems to have been made up on the spot as the film was shot. No point to anything in the movie. Seems like the people who made this did it for no reason other then to state their views on sex, and display a vulgar European fetish. If you've always wanted to see Liv's breasts, or you love looking at the Italian countryside then this is the movie for you. Otherwise stay clear of this bore fest. I gave it a two instead of a one for one simple reason, there are worse movies... although it's hard to imagine when watching this.

I first watched this film when I was fourteen when it came out in the cinema. I squirmed and blushed at the sex scenes and it made me incredibly uncomfortable at that age, sitting with my parents. But I didn't forget it, and have watched it again and again since. It is not for people who want to sit on the edge of their seat, it is not a white knuckle ride of adventure, with clever plot-twists and turns. No, you watch Stealing Beauty at your leisure, sprawled over your armchair, supine,with a little smile on your face. You absorb it. It changes the world for you for a while afterwards, which is why it is best to watch it in the summer. You go out and appreciate the sun more, because you have that residual sense of viewing it all through Bertolucci's eyes. The film even manages to blend beauty with vulgarity so perfectly that it seems impossible to make a distinction between the two. Your small existence with all its petty problems, relationship difficulties and unglamourous sex seem suddenly shifted into a new light, and you realise for a few moments that to be real, to be here in this fraught life, is, in its own way, beautiful.