[In the following review, Simon offers a negative assessment of Stealing Beauty, calling the film “a nasty tease.”]

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 succès 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 [Stealing Beauty], 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 virtù 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, Niccolò; 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 aperçus 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.

Lucy is very pretty and becomes the cynosure not only of the aforementioned characters, but also of several faceless and epicene young men who also loiter about. Wherever she looks, someone is poking someone of the opposite or same sex, and she is disturbed: “You're in need of a ravisher,” Alex opines, sagely. There is nude bathing and sunbathing at the pool, pseudo-sophisticated badinage everywhere (“We've become a nation of monologists,” or “Let us bring up the rear, like Turgenev's poor Rakitin”), and one close call after another for Lucy's hymen. But the girl always bristles and runs. There is also one very shy, dark, and introverted youth who considers Lucy “plastic,” but seems to have been the one who actually wrote her some lyrical letters. (Guess what his role will be.)

Perversion lurks around the corners. Richard and Miranda are glimpsed falling to sadomasochistic sex. At the annual summer ball at a nearby spectacular palazzo and grounds, orgiasts are everywhere. As Lucy is dancing with Carlo, a woman comes along, squats, and pees, asserting that this is what Carlo really likes. Lucy even takes a snaggle-toothed young Brit home with her, but then insists on separate beds. Oddest, however, is a narcissistic episode before a mirror, triangular in cross-section, that runs along an entire wall in Lucy's room as a kind of dado. Richard gets down on all fours before it, has Lucy do so next to him; then he licks his image in the mirror and has the delighted Lucy follow suit. In between such incidents, she conducts coy colloquies, meant to be soul-searching, with her elders.

In due time, Lucy finds out what an olive grove looks like; what death means, as the aptly epigrammatizing Alex is carted off to the hospital; who her real father is; and how it feels to have sex. One is sorry for the decent actors—Donal McCann, Sinead Cusack, Carlo Cecchi, Stefania Sandrelli—mired in this smutty-adolescent stew. And even for the less decent ones, such as Jean Marais, whom one is glad to see still alive and handsome, even if made to spout nonsense; and Jeremy Irons, insufferably mannered though he has become. D. W. Moffett (Richard) and Rachel Weisz (Miranda) pretty much deserve what they get, as do the shadowy young men flitting about.

As Lucy, there is Liv Tyler, who does have something, although it may not be acting talent. Tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed, heavy-lidded, and sensually thick-lipped, this sexy 18-year-old daughter of a rock star and an ex-model is well on her way to stardom. But she has yet to be in a movie that offers her a chance to act, instead of merely surrounding her with unwholesome, aestheticizing innuendo that strains to elevate indeterminacy into significance.

Years ago, Bertolucci said in an interview with Joseph Gelmis, “Giorgio Morandi painted bottles all the time. … And there are some directors who make always the same film. And poets who write always the same poem. This to me is very beautiful. Because the robins sing always the same song.” Alas, obsessions are not all of the same value. The bullfrog may be just as obsessive in his song as the robin in his, but they are hardly equivalent. Morandi's bottles (and cups and salad bowls) came only after he had proved his mastery with superb landscapes. And still-lifes—think Chardin, think Cézanne—are something more forthright and ecumenical than smirking allusions to homosexuality and self-indulgent oglings of perversion as, for instance, in this scene from 1900, as described by David Shipman:

There is a wedding ceremony during which the aristocratic Amelia (Laura Betti) shouts four-letter words before rushing off to the woodshed where she performs fellatio on the Fascist Attila (Donald Sutherland): discovered by a small boy, he and then she sodomize him before killing him by swinging him by his legs so that his head is crushed by the four walls—for which the rich young man allows his best friend to be blamed, despite his being miles away at the time.

The director pretends to be making a moral statement—this is how evil the Fascists were—but is really reveling in pathology. Bertolucci's Marxism was no more committed than his present dilettantism; politics was always merely an excuse for perverse suggestiveness.

Yet even this is never honest. Bertolucci keeps teasing you, in small matters as in large. Thus, in a bathtub scene in Stealing Beauty, he displays Liv Tyler's right breast: later, as she poses for Ian (whose final portrait of her is totally different), Bertolucci has her baring her left breast. In the film's penultimate scene of grunting sex, he carefully reveals nothing; it's all a nasty tease. Morandi's bottles are a wholly different matter as, with the passing years, the painter kept stripping them down more and more toward their essence. If Bertolucci is a master of anything, it is of the inessential.