Producers: Will Packer and Johanna Byer Director: Kat Coiro Screenplay: Ryan Engle Cast: Halle Bailey, Regé-Jean Page, Lorenzo de Moor, Isabella Ferrari, Paolo Sassanelli, Marco Calvani, Stella Pecollo, Stefania Casini, Emanuele Pacca, Desirèe Pöpper, Aziza Scott, Tommaso Cassissa and Nia Vardalos Distributor: Universal
Grade: D+
One often has to make allowances for inanities in movies, an axiom that applies especially to romantic comedies. But this one from writer Ryan Engle (who previously specialized in action thrillers for Liam Neeson and big-animal behemoths like “Beast” and “Rampage”) and director Kat Coiro (a prolific TV veteran whose only other feature was the woebegone 2022 romcom “Marry Me”) stretches one’s willingness to put up with idiocy beyond the breaking point. Though its Italian locations are pretty and its leads attractive though charmless, the screenplay comes across as something cobbled together by a chatbox on the fritz, and it’s directed as though it were a puffed-up sitcom destined to disappear after a single season.
The problems start in the NYC-set prologue. Anna (Halle Bailey) is meant to be a sweet, sympathetic heroine, but she’s actually a schemer, a “professional house sitter” who takes the opportunity to effectively adopt the lifestyles of her employers, wearing their clothes to look great and act rich and impressive. There’s a reason behind it, of course: she and her mother had a love of preparing Italian cuisine together and planned to go to Italy to indulge it, but after her mom died, so did Anna’s ambition; she quit culinary school, gave up cooking altogether, and instead adopted her less savory method of living other peoples’ dreams rather than her own.
When her latest employer (Nia Vardalos) comes home early and discovers her misuse of her closet, she’s fired and her BFF Claire (Aziza Scott, whose shrillness makes her an irritant from her first line of dialogue) advises her to get it together. Serendipity intervenes at the bar in the hotel where Claire works. Anna bumps into Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor), a gregarious real estate man from Tuscany who tells her about his wonderful hometown, San Conessa, and after they share his room for the night, he advises her to follow her dream in a farewell note. She impulsively decides to use most of her meager savings to fly to Italy.
She makes her way to San Contessa with the help of Lorenzo (Marco Calvani), a incredibly generous guy who drives a ludicrous mini-cab, only to find that all the hotels are filled with visitors for the local festival. She also has a run-in with a rude but handsome fellow, Michael (Regé-Jean Page), who buys the sandwich she was salivating over in a local shop. None deterred, she makes her way to Matteo’s conveniently empty villa, sneaks in and makes it her own—until his mother Gabriella (Isabella Ferrari) and nonna Alessia show up to clean the spotless place. Fortunately, Anna is wearing an engagement ring she’d found while snooping through Matteo’s things, so Gabriella assumes that she’s her son’s fiancée and that the wayward guy, who left abruptly, will soon return. Despite Alessia’s suspicions Anna is at once drawn into the Costa family.
Predictably, it’s a bunch of gregarious, food-loving Italians straight out of central-casting fantasyland. Gabriella and her husband Vincenzo (Paolo Sassanelli) run a local restaurant, assisted by all the other members of the clan. Among the most notable are the chubby, chatty Francesca (Stella Pecollo), who represents ethnic sauciness (she readily advertises having an affair with the plumber) and Enzo (Tommaso Cassissa), who’s obsessed with taking photos for his internet followers (three, we’re told). But the big surprise—to Anna, if not us—is that Michael is one of them, the cousin of Matteo who was adopted by the Costas when his parents were killed in a car crash and tends to the family vines. Matteo left, it appears, out of pique that his parents, in his view, loved his adopted brother more.
Inevitably, of course, Anna and Michael are drawn together, and Matteo returns unexpectedly. Equally unexpectedly, he falls in with Anna’s lie about being his betrothed, even though he takes up secretly with his jilted ex Isabella (Desirèe Pöpper), for whom the ring Anna’s wearing was presumably intended first. (As written and played Matteo is a weirdly two-faced character, sometimes nice but often nasty.) Michael, of course, is conflicted, falling for Anna but thinking her affianced to his resentful brother.
But not to worry, things ultimately turn out well in the romance department, thanks to prodding at the critical moment when Anna’s about to leave by the stern but pragmatic Nonna. (Isabella, after all, is already conveniently at hand.) And Anna gets her culinary vibe back when Vincenzo is injured just as the carnival’s best-meal contest is about to begin and she’s recruited to take over the kitchen in his place. At least Claire isn’t brought over for a big finale, with Scott mercifully relegated to a couple of zoom-style inserts.
Filling in the colorful background are not only Lorenzo, who appears periodically to muse about how romantic everything is, but Giuseppe (Emanuele Pacca), a bovine gardener who belts out Verdi every morning while tending to the same bush at Matteo’s villa. And wait until you see the pièce de resistance of the town festival—a barrel-rolling contest in which Matteo and Michael are forced to work together to try to beat teams from the other vineyards. For some viewers another highlight will come just before the one-hour mark, when Michael is caught in the spray from the vineyard’s irrigation system and peels off his wet shirt, allowing Danny Ruhlmann’s camera to linger on his well-muscled torso in a way sure to provoke squeals of delight from a significant proportion of the audience.
Otherwise Rahlmann’s wide-screen cinematography is excessively bright, as is common in this genre, but captures the Italian vistas reasonably well, while the interiors of production designer Elena Albanese look utterly soundstage-bound rather than lived-in and Massimo Cantini Parrini’s costumes similarly appear to have come just off the rack. John Debney’s score accentuates the obvious.
As for the actors, most of the secondary cast, like Scott, come off far too strong—Pecollo most obviously, though she gets a lot of easy laughs. Bailey projects winsomeness in abundance, even if Anna sometimes seems too much the simpering naïf, despite her calculating nature. Page, by contrast, is good-looking but curiously stiff, and one wonders whether the contorted explanation about Michael’s having been brought up in London wasn’t a hasty addition to the script that allowed him to speak with his English accent to avoid having to attempt a fake Italian one.
Perhaps the audience at which “You, Me & Tuscany” is aimed will be willing to swallow its narrative manipulation and the lumpiness of Zene Baker and Troy Takaki’s editing and simply wallow in the movie’s fairy-tale wish-fulfillment. But it’s a mediocre example of a genre that’s becoming increasingly difficult to pull off—an exhausting concatenation of clichés, absurdities, stereotypes and food porn all wrapped up in a glossy but completely empty package.