STEALING BEAUTY (1996) *1/2 (out of four) Image B+ Sound A- Extras D+

Buy at Amazon USA Buy at Amazon Canada or Compare Prices Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty is basically auteur-slumming at The WB; if "Dawson's Creek" had ever done an episode abroad, I can't imagine it being that far removed from what we have here. Opening with a mixed-media montage of Liv Tyler in transit that ebbs and flows to the faux grunge strains of Liz Phair's "Rocket Boy," the film takes a page from the television-pilot handbook by introducing each character with the expositional thoroughness of a tour guide's spiel. While this is justified from a storytelling standpoint, with Tyler's 19-year-old Lucy arriving in Italy at the beginning of the picture and greeting her cohabitants for the summer, the film takes forever to find a narrative hook as a result. Her mother having recently committed suicide, Lucy is sent to stay at the villa of a family friend's, ostensibly so that he (Donal McCann), the artist, can do her portrait, though she brings with her a private agenda that includes finding out who her real father is, sussing out the author of an old secret-admirer note, and getting her cherry popped. Stealing Beauty's correlations with the later The Dreamers--a ripe lead with bee-stung lips; a moment in which the 19-year-old protagonist nestles a paramour's photograph against an erogenous zone (a gesture Jonathan Rosenbaum called in his review of The Dreamers "the perfect encapsulation of Bertolucci's idea of a turn-on"); scatological punchlines; an unlikely virgin; shock nudity--are numerous and sundry, so much so that one would like to call the newer film an apologia. Trouble is, The Dreamers isn't good enough to do anything but reinforce Bertolucci's current fetishes. If Stealing Beauty is reliably gorgeous (cinematographer Darius Khondji steals a little beauty of his own with brilliant homages to Paul Cezanne) and possessed of scattered nuggets of actual wisdom, not just the kind you get from reading the literature on Lilith Fair (I'm especially fond of dying writer Jeremy Irons' frantic search for what he considers one of his finest pieces of work ("I would think that since I can't find it," he qualifies)), it's also rife with shallow performances (Tyler's is particularly impenetrable, pardon the pun; the camera loves her, but she doesn't love it back), perfunctory soundtrack cues (Nina Simone is as haphazardly applied here as Edith Piaf is at the end of The Dreamers), and listless payoffs. Someone close to Bertolucci should tell him that there's nothing more unseemly than precociousness in reverse. Fox presents Stealing Beauty in a tantalizing 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer; the disc came out in 2001, and though nothing about the image screams "dated," black levels aren't very steep (at a cost to shadow detail) and there is sporadic print debris. Generally lacking in nuance, the Dolby Digital 5.1 mix takes a wall-of-sound approach to the song selections, which have a slightly more immersive character here than they do on CD. Extras-wise, Tyler, Bertolucci, and other members of the production lend soundbites to a 7-minute promotional featurette in which Tyler casually reveals something she has in common with Lucy (her well-documented misadventure in paternity), while the international trailer and three TV spots for Stealing Beauty plus trailers for Drive Me Crazy, Ever After, French Kiss, Love Potion #9, Never Been Kissed, The Object of My Affection, Romeo + Juliet, Say It Isn't So, Someone Like You, and Where the Heart Is round out the disc.-Bill Chambers Running Time 119 minutes Aspect Ratio(s) 2.35:1 ONLY, 16x9-enhanced; Languages E DD 5.1, English Dolby Surround, French Stereo; CC Yes; Subtitles English, Spanish; DVD-9; Region One; Fox

But The Dreamers isn't about Paris' 1968 cultural revolution in a literal sense, choosing instead to use its setting as the backdrop for a chamber piece about Matthew, Theo, and Isabelle, left alone in the siblings' parents' flat. Cloistered away in the middle of the conflagration, their obsession with film musters and explodes without the viable outlet of the Cinematheque, manifesting in a series of sadistic, often sexual games centered on movie knowledge and the price of ignorance. Bertolucci cuts these scenes with clips from a wonderful selection of classic cinema: Garbo memorizing her room in Queen Christina, Nadine Nortier's suicide in Bresson's Mouchette, Fred Astaire waking Ginger Rogers in Top Hat, Odile, Arthur, and Franz's sprint through the Louvre in Bande á part, and so on--asking his young actors to mimic these scenes in motions that are part trance, part tango. At its best, without the direct reference, The Dreamers pings off the jubilant energy of Breathless.

The suggestion, and it's one drunk with sublimity, is that our relationship with film transcends articulation, encompassing philosophy, politics, sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, and pot-spiced bubble baths that last a day in one giant, sloppy, beautiful clinch. The memories of the films that we watch are as vivid as (read: more vivid than) the memories of our lives, and, in point of fact, there's no substantive difference between them in terms of their affect on the substance of our selves. The heroes of The Dreamers are stars of their own suspended matinee; when they ultimately join the riots seething along the Champs Elysées, Matthew's chilling observation that the throng is an epic comprised completely of extras, not idols, comes to pass.

Disturbingly, Bertolucci, a poet raised on the cinema in Langlois' Cinematheque, a "true artist" now refusing interviews to anyone not associated with a "major daily," has crafted a film that talks about growing out of movie love as something inevitable and to be accepted with resignation. There isn't so much growth on the part of his trio as there is a clarification of the stratified stereotypes in which each of the characters is straitjacketed. Its conclusion makes of The Dreamers standard fare: the death of the dream in the film is the death of the dream outside of the film, and where once Bertolucci would have found fruit in the refuge of illusion, and value in the celebration of cinematic half-life, he can now only find futility in bearing up against the inexorable tide of the real. The Dreamers is a betrayal of dreaming.-Walter Chaw (excerpted from a longer review found here)

Produced for the BBC, "Bertolucci Makes The Dreamers" (52 mins.) distinguishes itself from studio fodder almost immediately through smoking interviewees and an unspoken assumption that we're familiar with the subject matter of The Dreamers itself. The highlights of the piece, directed by David Thompson and narrated by Zoë Wanamaker, are, without question, the glimpses of Bertolucci at work. Anyone who's visited a movie set will tell you it's the small stuff that winds up taking the longest to get right, and it's fun watching someone as highbrow as Bertolucci grow progressively sarcastic ("Am I speaking Russian?!") as Green repeatedly neglects the cue to step away from a jukebox. As a window into the auteur's late-career preoccupation with adolescent angst, "Bertolucci Makes The Dreamers" is illuminating, bookended as it is by telling quotes ("When I'm with these kids, I feel the same age" and "Maybe I didn't talk enough about young people when I was young") that make one wish Bertolucci would do a film about the vanishing act of youth rather than these pitiful attempts to trap it in a jar. Three Legged Cat's "Outside the Window: Events in France, 1968" (14 mins.) expands on the last chapter of the previous featurette by recounting, in Godardian fashion, the events leading up to and the aftermath of the real-life student riots that play such a pivotal role in the final few minutes of The Dreamers. Bertolucci and Professor Robin Blackburn (editor of NEW LEFT REVIEW) appear to have a less negative take on the outcome of the revolution than the returning Adair does, but that's splitting hairs--in the end, the three viewpoints are more complementary than contradictory. Michael Pitt and the Twins of Evil's curious video for "Hey Joe," helmed by Bertolucci (working in a medium that doesn't flatter him), rounds out the platter alongside trailers for The Dreamers and the upcoming Garden State (yeah, the one with the Frou Frou song).-Bill Chambers

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