Bernardo Bertolucci's cinematic return to Italy is a film in which very little happens - but beautifully. Scripted by novelist Susan Minot from a story by Bertolucci, it accurately targets the breed of expatriate aesthetes who have made Tuscany their own dreamscape. It also provides leggy uberstarlet Liv Tyler (here radiantly resembling a ganglier young Ava Gardner) with a rare opportunity to enamour, a break she capitalises on with composure.
Tyler plays Lucy, a virginal, sensitive and artistic American teenager (we'll let pass those contradictions in terms), who visits the extended family of arty friends of her late poet mother at their villa for a languorous Tuscan summer.
Presiding as Earth Mother is Sinead Cusack, with sculptor husband Donal McCann, dying friend/novelist Irons, wacky old coot Jean Marais, toy boy toting Stefania Sandrelli, jaded, brittle daughter of the house Rachel Weisz and an assortment of randy young men, Anglo and Italian.
Lucy's freshness fascinates this uninhibited, sensation-craving set, and the revelation of her purity both amuses them and gets everybody's juices flowing. Meanwhile, she has two secret purposes to her visit: she intends to complete the seduction initiated by a handsome young Italian neighbour a few years earlier, and she wants to solve a romantic mystery hinted at in her dead mother's diary. How she gets on in both missions is delicately and deliberately paced while Bertolucci, with characteristic elegance and stealthy control, intrudes on the exclusive, unreal world the characters have created.
The stately tempo he takes for this round of amorous, artistic and philosophical musings is not to everyone's taste. Neither is the undeniable and uncomfortable element of voyeurism implicit in the tireless ogling of the adolescent heroine. Bertolucci fans of old may well sigh for the political passion that made his earlier work more powerful. But the grace, craft and real wit in this country house party make it his most seductive film in a very long while.