Stealing Beauty

Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci from a screenplay he co-wrote with Susan Minot, Stealing Beauty is a 1996 coming-of-age romantic drama and a co-production of France, Italy and the United Kingdom. It was shot in Tuscany and selected for the official competition at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival.

Lucy Harmon, a nineteen-year-old American, travels to a Tuscan villa near Siena after the suicide of her poet mother, Sara, invited to spend the summer with her mother's artist friends. Lucy had visited the house four years earlier, when she shared her first kiss with Niccolo, one of the young people living there, and she now hopes to reconnect with him. Instead she finds herself surrounded by an older circle of bohemian artists who turn the beautiful young woman into an object of desire and a source of inspiration. Over the course of the summer Lucy confronts both the secrets of her own past and the pains of growing up. The cast includes Liv Tyler, Jeremy Irons, Sinéad Cusack, Joseph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz; the film also marks the final screen appearance of Jean Marais.