Sometimes I wish I could turn back the clock to be a child once more. Soft skinned with a simple understanding of the world. A world that is big and seemingly kind. 

I just recently watched Stealing Beauty, the 1996 film with Liv Tyler. Re-watched might be a better word to use, but I must have been watching this movie with my eyes closed the first time around, because I did not remember this movie to be so beautiful and touching. I also think that viewing this movie with a considerable amount of distance from the plot is necessary.

Stealing Beauty is startlingly sensual and tactile in the emotions that the director, Bernado Bertolucci brings to the viewer.

Rather than a story of love, life, and death that the film seems to tote, for me, it is so much more about a sense of nostalgia or a desire for this particular nostalgia of a first taste of sensuality. Rather than a coming of age, a connection to the sensual side of oneself is presented. Because, even though Lucy (Liv Tyler) is presented in such a fashion of over dramatized virginal sexualization with the line of suitors and scenes of skirts flipping up and such the strongest points of sensuality of Lucy are in the moments with herself. The scene where Lucy is sitting in the bath and writing is a moment of clarity and self awareness. 

Watching this film is like remembering a discovery of self and sexuality. The rolling Tuscan landscape, the warm sun, Lucy’s laugh, a lover’s caress across thighs, all of these are captured in Stealing Beauty.