STEALING BEAUTY - * 1/2 - Liv Tyler, Carlo Cecchi, Sinead Cusack, Jeremy Irons; in English, and in Italian with English subtitles; rated R (sex, nudity, profanity, vulgarity, drugs); exclusively at the Cineplex Odeon Trolley Square Mall.You can't pass a magazine rack these days without seeing Liv Tyler on several covers, hyping her new movie "Stealing Beauty," which was almost as big a deal at the Cannes Film Festival as Tyler herself.

The attention will no doubt boost Tyler's fledgling career - but it probably won't persuade anyone to see the movie if they were not already so inclined.

Tyler plays Lucy, a 19-year-old American woman who travels to the lush, gorgeously photographed countryside of Tuscany to spend some time at a villa with old friends of her mother, who has recently passed away.

The ostensible reason for her journey is to discover who her real father is - she assumes he is residing at the villa - and she also hopes to rekindle a relationship with a young man she met four years earlier. He was the first boy to kiss her and she has carried a torch for him ever since.

Of course, this being a film by Bernardo Bertolucci ("Last Tango in Paris"), she also desires to lose her virginity while she's there. To whom? That is the film's real mystery, as the various eccentrics who populate the villa gossip about Lucy's potential lovers.

Chief among this group is a dying writer, played by Jeremy Irons, who becomes something of a mentor, silently lusting after her and seemingly in as much pain for having to enjoy her love vicariously as for his debilitating disease.

In addition, there is the nurturing matriarch and hostess of the villa (Sinead Cusack), her volatile artist-husband (Donal McCann), their daughter (Miranda Fox), the daughter's American lover (D.W. Moffett) and an aging art dealer (Jean Marais).

Bertolucci, who won an Oscar for "The Last Emperor," and who is generally associated with more epic efforts than this light, cloistered melodrama, approaches the inner turmoil of his characters from Lucy's viewpoint with no small amount of distance.

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True, she seems to invigorate each and every member of this bohemian art colony. But because she is a virtual stranger, Lucy remains a bit tentative and wary. And since Tyler's performance seems equally tentative and wary, everything pretty much stays on the surface.

The result is more tedious than insightful, and the film just meekly limps along, without any wit, passion or fire.

Shunning emotional payoffs, Bertolucci merely teases the audience, and the result, as you might guess, is less than satisfying.

"Stealing Beauty" is rated R for sex, nudity, profanity, vulgarity and drug abuse.

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