Movie review: 'You, Me and Tuscany' muddles basic love story
by Fred Topel · UPILOS ANGELES, April 9 (UPI) -- Of all the movie genres, romantic-comedy seems most forgiving of formulaic cliches. Despite all that goodwill, You, Me and Tuscany, in theaters Friday, squanders its cast's chemistry with insulting scenarios and redundant machinations.
Anna (Halle Bailey) spends a night with Matteo Costa (Lorenzo de Moor), who encourages her to fulfill her dream of visiting Italy, even though she just got fired and has no money. Anna takes the leap, but didn't research the summer festival that has all the hotels in Tuscany booked.
But, she saved a picture of Matteo's family house, and since she knows he's traveling for business, Anna crashes there. Immediately, his mother, Gabriella (Isabella Ferrari) and Nonna (Stefania Casini) catch her there.
Due to shenanigans involving an engagement ring that won't come off, they assume Anna is Matteo's fiance. Needless to say, this complicates things when Anna actually falls for Matteo's cousin, Michael (Regé-Jean Page).
The filmmakers seem to think this is so complicated it needs to be repeated after every scene. This is a recent Hollywood mandate to have characters restate their situations scene by scene.
So right after she is caught by the Costas, Anna tells her cab driver, Lorenzo (Marco Calvani), that she snuck into the Costa house and now they think she's engaged to Matteo, which the audience just saw. You, Me and Tuscany was already optimized to stream on Peacock for people not paying attention.
The shorthand used to establish Anna would feel rushed even on The Hallmark Channel. After getting fired from her housesitting job, she narrates a slide show about how her late mother encouraged her to go to Culinary Institute of New York, but then her mother got sick.
Still, they didn't fit it all in there, and Bailey dubs some glaring additional lines over the back of her head to tell Matteo she hasn't cooked since her mother's death. Obviously, she ends up helping the Costa family in the kitchen later.
Anna and Matteo's first night together is so chaste it feels platonic. Matteo falls asleep from jet lag, because God forbid audiences would have to support a sex-positive young woman who has a consensual one-night stand.
Michael is introduced with a trifecta of rude behavior. He almost runs her over, insults her in Italian and takes the sandwich she was going to order.
He becomes less aggressive when he sees that Anna is making his family happy again, after a rift with Matteo. Anna's grief, and the Costas' regret, would be poignant themes if the film would ever stop and sit with them for a whole scene.
Michael also takes his shirt off to cover Anna when the vineyard sprinklers go off, but the film seems to at least have a sense of humor about contriving that moment.
The Costa family members each have affectations instead of personalities. Enzo (Tommaso Cassissa) is the young, social media-savvy modern kid who's always on his phone posting something.
Francesca (Stella Pecollo) brags about her "side piece," because Europeans are more open about infidelity, right? There are two Robertos who don't do much after revealing they have the same name in the same family.
Anna's friend in New York, Claire (Aziza Scott), literally phones in the comic relief best friend role. Once in Tuscany, Anna and Claire communicate exclusively via voicemails and one FaceTime near the end.
Scott does the best she can with jokes about Get Out and organ thieves. They're better than a wine tour group doing versions of "I'll have what she's having."
One cute bit is trying to teach the Costas how to pronounce Anna with an American accent. That and a few pratfalls are the extent of the com part of this rom-com.
Even the outtakes at the end don't have new jokes. The blooper reel includes several variations of the same line which gets less funny with each iteration.
It's hard to evaluate whether Page and Bailey actually had chemistry. You, Me and Tuscany is too busy reminding the audience what just happened to let us get swept up in the moment.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.