Sitting in the stuffy common room of our Massachusetts boarding school, my friend Jess turned to me and said, “I just saw Liv Tyler’s labia.”

She said it in the flat tone that teenagers adopt when they’re completely shocked and impressed by something but refuse to let you know. It was the first time she’d seen Stealing Beauty, but for me, it was probably the 10th. Each time I showed the film to a friend, it felt as if I were deliberately passing on a virus. Curled onto the hard and lumpy dorm couches, the two of us zipped into hoodies, I glanced at Jess to see if the film had caught: Her expression held steadfastly neutral, but her eyes were riveted, and something in her slightly open mouth betrayed the truth. Like me, she was a goner.

It’s been 20 years since Stealing Beauty was released, and yet, it’s somehow escaped the anniversary hoopla that films like Kids and Clueless received. Like those movies, it, too, is the story of a teenage girl at the start of her romantic and sexual life. There are no retrospective listicles, no 12 Lessons We Learned From Stealing Beauty. But of all these seminal coming-of-age films, Stealing Beauty is the one my friends and I re-watched the most — the one I think we did learn from, though we may not have known that at the time. Kids presented all the shock and awful consequence of sex, while Clueless kept it squeaky-clean. Stealing Beauty painted all of it on one luscious canvas: the ache, the thrill, the sadness, and the fumbling lust. Watching as a teenager, it was both jarring and familiar, as if someone had stolen the filthy secrets in my mind and spun them into satin.

“It was kind of like the greatest thing that ever happened and the worst thing that ever happened,” Liv Tyler says, laughing. It was “the worst,” she clarifies, “because it was never that good ever again!” Tyler, of course, played the lead role, Lucy, a young woman who’s come to spend the summer in Tuscany with her deceased mother’s old friends — one of whom, she suspects, is her biological father. The house is a colony of artists and ex-pats, all thrown into a tizzy at the arrival of this lovely, curious girl.