Few would call “Under the Tuscan Sun” a classic, but that easygoing, breezy Diane Lane vehicle from 2003 has a kind of enduring cultural presence. It still appears regularly on TV schedules, in-flight menus, and even more old-fashioned Airbnb rentals where hosts provide half a dozen bland DVDs for your potential viewing pleasure. Why wouldn’t it? It’s as beautiful and delicious as Hollywood’s wish-fulfillment, and it’s inspired the vacation fantasies of millions, or fanciful getaways for the lucky ones. More than 20 years later, “You, Me and Tuscany” is no stranger to its quietly long shadow. “Take me out here in the Tuscan sun and I’ll be your Diane Lane,” says a passing character in this romantic comedy from the Will Packer production line. This clunky reference at least makes the new work’s modest aspirations perfectly clear.
Or it turned out to be not so modest. For almost every time, this sunny yet canned-feeling exercise serves to illustrate how difficult it is to pull off airy duds like “Under the Tuscan Sun” and “While You Were Sleeping,” to name just two of the fin-de-siècle touchstones most blatantly shattered in Ryan Engle’s patchwork script. The similarities are mostly limited to plot points. In most other ways, including its languid writing, gauche branding, and stock-footage aesthetic, “You, Me & Tuscany” closely resembles the direct-to-stream material that has come to define modern rom-coms since the genre was largely ignored by the major studios. Universal may give the film a wide theatrical release this weekend, but director Kat Coiro’s film plays as if it were designed and directed by an algorithm.
How this film fares may be a test of how interested audiences are in seeing singer-turned-actor Halle Bailey appear in a role that has nothing to do with music. Whether it’s a little nostalgic rendition of Mario’s 1990s R&B hit “Let Me Love You,” or watching “Bridgerton” star Regé-Jean Page take on more modern dreamboat duties. Both are engaging and engaging performers, but both have color outside of the script’s faint lines when it comes to their characters, and each owes more backstory than personality. On the other hand, when together, their chemistry never goes beyond friendly. The movie may be tied to PG-13 sexlessness, but there’s no winking hint here that hints at the possibility of getting sweaty off-screen.
Single New Yorker Anna (Bailey) is introduced as a bit of a prick, but you wouldn’t know it from Bailey’s creaky screen presence and everlasting presentation. Since abandoning her studies at culinary school due to her mother’s death, she has been working as a professional house sitter and is eager to try out the lifestyle of a wealthy employee. After being fired by a recent subordinate (Nia Vardalos in an ungrateful cameo), Anna falls into the mercy of her best friend, Claire (Aziza Scott), an enraged receptionist at a luxury hotel, and then into the arms of Matteo (Lorenzo de Moore), a flamboyant Italian hotel guest. It’s just a one-night stand, but when Matteo talks about his idyllic life in his hometown of Tuscany, Anna makes a rash decision. Anna spends her last savings to buy a plane ticket to Italy and haphazardly pursues a “happy life”.
This turned out to be one of Anna’s more rational decisions overall. When she arrived in Tuscany without booking accommodation, she conveniently remembered the address of a luxurious villa that Matteo had vacant there, and conveniently and easily broke into her. When Matteo’s conveniently estranged family learns of her existence, they conveniently and quickly believe her claim to be the prodigal son’s fiancée, and she is quickly accepted into their family. This portrait of a talkative, bickering, intermittently violent family with pure marinara sauce flowing through their veins doesn’t defy Italian stereotypes. Mateo’s British-born adopted son, Michael (Paige), is a generously two-dimensional outlier by comparison.
After meeting Cute at a local deli and arguing over the last truffled prosciutto sandwich (“gourmet” is the closest thing we get to our heroine’s signature character traits), Anna and Michael open up to each other in an instant, even if they outwardly dislike each other. If you’ve seen the movie before, you can connect the dots from there. After all, the best romantic comedies revel in predictability, and “You, Me & Tuscany” plods toward its inevitable conclusion with a plodding, formulaic sense of obligation. If the stakes don’t feel particularly high, that’s because the emotions aren’t particularly deep. Dramatic obstacles are placed haphazardly and quickly overcome, while the potential for outright farce is resolved as quickly as it arises. The tone may be consistently light, but the actual laughs are rare.
Even the Tuscan landscape, which may be the most must-see asset here, is matter-of-factly shot and imaginatively developed by Coiro (“Marry Me”) and cinematographer Danny Ruhlman, rarely serving as more than a bright screensaver-style backdrop for monotonous dialogue scenes. (In fact, intentional or not, most of the pieces here could be cut vertically with relative ease.) “You, Me & Tuscany” passes the time painlessly enough, but it’s never the complete escape it wants to be: It’s so familiar, so carefully packaged, that you can hardly believe it’s celebrating the urge to wander freely and restlessly.
