Stealing Beauty – Io ballo da sola

Stealing Beauty (French: Beauté volée; Italian: Io ballo da sola) is a 1996 drama film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and starring Liv Tyler, Joseph Fiennes, Jeremy Irons, Sinéad Cusack, and Rachel Weisz. Written by Bertolucci and Susan Minot, the film is about an American teenage girl who travels to a lush Tuscan villa near Siena to stay with family friends of her poet mother who recently committed suicide. The film was actress Liv Tyler’s first leading film role. Stealing Beauty premiered in Italy in March 1996, and was officially selected for the 1996 Cannes Film Festival in France in May. It was released in the United States on June 14, 1996.

Plot

Lucy Harmon, an American teenager, arrives in the lush Tuscan countryside to be sculpted by a family friend who lives in a beautiful villa there. Lucy visited there four years earlier and exchanged a kiss with an Italian boy with whom she hopes to become reacquainted. Lucy’s mother, who lived in the villa, has committed suicide since then. Lucy also hopes to discover the identity of her father, who her mother hinted was a resident of the villa. Once there, Lucy meets and befriends a variety of eccentric locals who were companions of her mother, and begins to form relationships and connections with each of them, specifically with Alex Parrish.

Lucy yearns to lose her virginity and becomes an object of intense interest to the men of the household, but the suitor she finally selects is not the initial object of her affection. After Alex is brought into hospital – presumably going there to die – Lucy loses her virginity in the farm fields outside the villa.