By all appearances, the major selling point of Bernardo Bertolucci's new film is Liv Tyler. While Bertolucci surely commands respect, he and everyone else associated with Stealing Beauty have been extolling its simplicity, its "lightness," its smallness compared to his previous work (The Conformist, 1900, Last Tango in Paris). You will have noticed that the "star-is-born" ad campaign is focusing on Tyler's pretty face and built-in celebrity: she's available on several magazine covers this month (e.g., Paper and Entertainment Weekly) and the stories never fail to mention that she's Steve Tyler's kid.

The hype goes to the point of the movie, which is that everyone in it is obsessed with looking at Tyler's Lucy, an "American girl" visiting family friends in Tuscany for the summer. That she's from the States means the older, mostly British, mostly arty expatriates can peg her as naive, precious and a little wild. That her mother is a dead poet gives her some aspirations to art and self-expression (the coolest thing she does is write wisps of not very good poetry on scraps of paper she then discards). That she's a virgin gives the movie an ostensible plot (the adults wonder about the 19-year-old's late blooming —"It's their generation, they are terrified of disease" — and the film climaxes with Lucy's getting laid) and central metaphor (the landscape and Lucy are equally objects of desire, lust and aesthetic appropriation).

In other words, the movie rather mindlessly deploys national, generational and sexual clichs, leaving Lucy in a void. While it occasionally takes her point of view, the bulk of the narrative is about how everyone else reads her. As in: "You're my own personal walking IV," says the dying playwright Alex (Jeremy Irons), who basically thanks her for letting him "look at" her just before he's carted off in an ambulance. While their relationship is set up as a kind of pathetic romance, it also lays out his self-involvement and her generosity, as well as his inability to fathom her. As he watches her rocking to Hole/Courtney Love's "Rock Star" in her Walkman headphones, he's perplexed. It seems as though the movie expects you to be as well, as it takes an "adult" perspective for granted.

This perspective is partial, of course, but also tiresome. And it's too bad, because while former model Tyler can work the camera, her performance is generally awkward, which in turn raises questions about how all these spectators are using her for their own, occasionally desperate, ends. You might even squirm a little when the movie starts with a video montage of Lucy sleeping on the train to Sienna, shot by some unseen fellow passenger.

This sequence establishes voyeurism as a prominent theme (see Lucy swim, see Lucy walk, see Lucy sit, whatever — she always looks great) and us as perps. It's a clunky device, and the film is full of them, including an evening party complete with mimes, and Jean Marais as the getting-senile member of the group, who walks around muttering underwhelming poetic wisdom, like "There is not love, only proof of love." Because the grown-ups come from the '60s, they think they've got a corner on revolution and passion, and like them, the movie can't quite give up the delusion that the old days were better, that there's something spiritual and dear about a girl's virginity, or that their bitterness and angst are more earned than that of a younger generation. Whether it means to or not, the movie leaves you wishing they'd get over their myopia.

That's His Virgin

Bernardo Bertolucci is elegant and he knows it. He drank coffee at the group interview and said what he wanted to say (and what he's said in other interviews) regardless of the questions asked. He said that he conceived the project as a way to come down from the international epics he'd been making (The Sheltering Sky, The Last Emperor, Little Buddha). He said, "The point was not going back to Italy to talk about Italy, because I felt like a foreigner because I'd been away for 15 years. I didn't feel that I could be accurate enough about that reality. Also, Italian reality in the past five years is so confused that the moment you film it, it changes in front of the camera. So, I decided to talk about a young girl. The first idea was about the virginity. But it wasn't because I wanted to go back to some kind of freshness, some kind of virginity, starting again in some way."

Instead, he uses Lucy as a metaphor. He views "kids" as many adults do, with some nostalgia for his own youth. "What it came out for me was that the kids know nothing about the past, a beautiful lack of historical memory. The relationship between the grownups and the kids is the opposite of what it used to be when I was young, say, '60s and '70s, which was based on conflict, on strong beliefs which were ideological and political. We wanted to be free and transgress. Today there is kind of feeling of reconciliation, because the kids don't want to transgress. They don't have the urgency."

While Bertolucci seems convinced that the movie is about Lucy's "deflowering," first-time screenwriter (and accomplished novelist) Susan Minot had a somewhat different take on the film's focus. She said that the idea of working with Bertolucci was initially "very intimidating. When I first met Bertolucci he had read some of my work, and he told me the idea that he had in mind and what he was looking for. He said that he wanted to do a smaller movie, and what goes on between people. When he was telling me the things he was looking for, I thought, okay, these are things I am naturally drawn to deal with, so I was consoled. He wasn't coming to me to write an epic or something. So it seemed like he knew what I could do."

She went on. "The challenge was actually in the phrase, 'She's on a mission to lose her virginity.' That was a challenge to me because that didn't make sense, it seemed kind of a male fantasy. I mean, it's possible, but it's not a story... The two sentences he gave me were: 'Young American or British girl goes to Tuscany to visit English expatriates. She's a virgin.' So those three elements, Tuscany, expatriates, and the young girl, that was the heart of it."

"The movie isn't really about virginity... To me, she's not on a mission to lose her virginity. I took that because I thought, here I am, I'm in the service of Bertolucci. But I sort of shifted that off onto projection by other people around her. But to maintain the idea of her being on a mission, I gave her this mission, to find her father. That's not really a subplot. [The scene where she meets her father] is far more intense a confrontation or connection than sleeping with the boy."