Bertolucci's "Stealing Beauty"
is really pretty enjoyable. My colleagues who had seen advance screenings
in Paris had roundly denounced it as pointless. I suspect they find a 19-year-old
virgin either beyond the realm of believability , or else, a non-issue.
Liv Tyler is very unpretentious and charming at the press conference. Bertolucci
is pretty adorable himself when, mixing French and English, he says that
he asked Tyler to come to London for a screen test, the French term for
which is "bout d'essai" pronounced "boo des-ay". But
Bertolucci's religious interests come peeking through his pronunciation,
which sounds like "Buddha Say".
Asked about his likely next film project, Bertolucci launched into a wistful
and fascinating account of what the late '60s meant to him and his generation.
"My return to Italy after 15 years has been sort of tip-toeing. Looking
at the beauty of Italy rather than Italy itself. I'd like to do a kind of
sequel to "1900", which ended in 1945 -- start it there and take
it through to the end of the century, which is the end of the millenium,
and try to see how we got to where we are now in Italy. But Italy is a fragment
of the rest of the world. Then I thought, how about, out of this big fresco,
let's pull out one year: 1968 in Rome, Paris, Berkeley. I thought it would
be very interesting to take the kids of today back to 1968. What '68 meant
to us in terms of the incredible capital of dreams, rebellion, freedom.
They don't know the amount,the VOLUME of hope that we had. I would like
to put them on an H.G. Wells time machine and take them back to confront
the kids of 1968. But cinema IS a time machine. Then again, the kids today
-- their PARENTS are the lids of '68. So how is it that todays kids know
nothing about '68?"
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