Bertolucci himself defended it in a 1996 Sight & Sound interview: "People ask me, 'What is the message?' There is no message. There is only the discovery that beauty is something you steal. You cannot inherit it. You cannot buy it. You must look at something and decide it is beautiful. That act—the decision—is the theft."
: Reconnect with a boy she kissed four years earlier and experience love for the first time. Key Highlights Stealing.Beauty.1996.-Bernardo.Bertolucci-.1080...
Because Stealing Beauty is a film about seeing . Cinematographer Darius Khondji ( Se7en , Evita ) bathed the film in a golden, grainy, hyper-saturated palette. In standard definition, the film looked muddy—the warm yellows bled into browns, the subtle textures of Liv Tyler’s freckled skin and the rough plaster walls of the villa were lost to compression artifacts. Bertolucci himself defended it in a 1996 Sight