REVIEW: You, Me & Tuscany

I've learned not to be ungrateful for movies like You, Me & Tuscany. It's the kind of picture that can be easily written off as predictable or derivative.

And Kat Cairo's film definitely rides on some genre shorthand. Halle Bailey's Anna has very similar flaws to most rom-com heroines as this untethered 20-something trying to figure out how to stretch a check. And the story itself lands about where every one of these movies do. (Though, remind me, how does every Tom Cruise movie end?)

After the screening concluded, one of the ladies sitting behind me even said something much like, "Yeah, that was a lot like While You Were Sleeping." But she didn't sound smug in her assessment. Her pronouncement was more encoded with the excitement that comes with discovery--the realization that she had found something like a worthy successor. And as a fan of Sandra Bullock's second-best rom-com, I was inclined to agree with this lady's verdict.

Brianna, "Anna" (Halle Bailey), is a failed chef who treads water in New York City by house-sitting for the wealthy. This wasn't her plan A. Her actual dream was to travel overseas to Italy with her mother to open a restaurant. It was that dream that moved her to enroll in culinary school, and it was the death of her mother that made Anna drop out and resign herself to her present half-life.

But a chance encounter in a hotel with a handsome foreigner, Matteo, compels her to take a chance and book that flight to Italy's golden countryside ... only to find out that everyone else had the exact same idea. The summer festival has seen every hotel in the city booked, and her only option is to crash in her sponsor's luxurious villa--the one she really thought was vacant.

Misunderstandings percolate, and suddenly Anna is passing herself off as Matteo's secret fiancé. And given just how eager this family is to adopt her, there's a chance she might be able to pass off the charade long enough to purchase a return ticket. But dang it! her fake-fiancé's cousin, Michael (Regé-Jean Page), is a hottie with whom she has a lot of common interests. The resulting sparks threaten to set off the dynamite, but is there any kind of graceful exit from a situation like this?

Movies like this live or die on the brightness of the lovebirds at their center. And the bar is perhaps higher for modern rom-coms chasing an audience that sees itself as rejecting old simplicities--especially old-fashioned romance. Both leads here do a fantastic job at minding the gap by exposing its own fallacy. Turns out, this leading heroine can be held together by duct tape and still be endlessly enchanting. Meanwhile, Regé-Jean Page's Michael is refined and dignified, yet at home in the soil and earth (and even "scoundrelly" in just the right helping).

And watching the supporting cast is like dishing into comfort food. (Marco Calvani steals the show as Anna's taxi driver who is also kind of her fairy-godmother.) Without overstuffing them with "quirks," the story affords the supporting cast with just enough eccentricity that we miss them when they're not onscreen. And without forcing the audience to take notes or memorize family trees, the characters behave as people and as a community with history. We are coming in on only the latest page of a story that was being written long before we were invited to this party.

You can feel the larger genre aggressively rejecting its caste as just a bunch of "airplane movies." Without stitching in any kind of explosions or spaceships, the film absolutely fills the screen. Sometimes that's with the painterly vineyard backdrops, sometimes that's with a rainbow of dinner dishes filling the table.

Perhaps we can decide that, yes, Anna should have seen something like this coming when she crossed continents on a whim all because a cute guy told her she should. But the thing is, she probably did see something like this coming. Seeing everything through the lens of the worst-case scenario is how you end up, as Matteo describes, "living someone else's life because you're too afraid to live your own."

The kind of leap that Anna makes in fulfilling this lifelong dream she had with her mother to jump over to the Italian countryside and hope to be swept away? It's going to come with some friction. You're going to stumble into some compromising, embarrassing situations. You're going to wonder whether or not taking this leap of faith was a mistake, and you're going to have to decide to persevere anyway.

For however much ribbing the genre endures for being "tailored" or even "unrealistic," rom-coms have always been honest about this. But the promise of the genre has always been that whatever bumps you trip into along the way, the prize for changing your scene, or opening yourself up to love, will pay the balance.

--The Professor

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