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lo hallo da sola /Stealing Beauty: A Contemporary Gaze on Women
After Little Buddha, Bertolucci returned to work in Italy and made lo ballo da sola/Stealing
Beauty (1996), which, in common with Little Buddha, presents a narrative denouement that
constitutes a satisfactory conclusion in terms of character evolution. This might be read as a
sign of optimism in the work of the director, who, for this film, declared: 'I am re-
experiencing the same enjoyment in making and discovering the cinema that was around in
the 60s' (Socci, 1996: 15). In reality, the film marks a return to more balanced filmic
structures in terms of intellectual and affective components, after the emphasis given to the
sensual aspects of cinematic narration in Bertolucci's previous three films. While Stealing
Beauty retains the same use of landscapes to cue the sort of intense aesthetic experiences
observed in The Sheltering Sky, the similar theme of the crisis of love relationships in
contemporary society is placed in a cognitive and intellectual framework closer to Last Tango
in Paris. Stealing Beauty can be said to revisit Tango's denunciation of consumer society's
commodification of human relationships, by articulating an idea of love relationships that
differs from the prevalent value systems of the period.
By the 1990s, little importance was attached to a teenager s first sexual experience,
and the loss of virginity was taken for granted as an inevitability. In the same way, the often
pragmatic, functional nature of affective relationships involving working women was
accepted as part of a woman's evolving role in contemporary society, hi Stealing Beauty,
Bertolucci's representation of socio-cultural reality indicates that these patterns were
changing. The film implies that despite the disconcerting level reached by society's
commodification of the female image, girls were endowing their 'first time' with expectation
and meaning, since they had become aware of the emotional drought characterizing the lives
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