You, Me & Tuscany Is a Rom-Com Simulation

Watching You, Me & Tuscany, I felt a little like the robot boy David at the end of Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). In the final scenes of that movie, David, unfrozen and brought back to “life” by a futuristic race of all-powerful AI thousands of years after humanity’s extinction, asks for one more day with his human mom, who abandoned him millennia ago. The AI kindly give this to him, and so David plays with the lonely avatar of his beloved mom for one last time. It’s extremely moving, but it’s also meant to be artificial and unfulfilling — a strangely shallow and melancholy interaction. And so I watched You, Me & Tuscany, a film that has all the moves and slick sheen of a classic studio romantic comedy but now, in the wake of the genre’s slow death as a theatrical commodity, feels a little forced and shallow. It’s as if the movie gods have given us one last ride with this once-beloved form before turning the lights out on us forever, as if to give us this palimpsest before reminding us that nothing ever lasts.

The leads, though, are mostly innocent. Halle Bailey is winsome and sprightly as Anna, a once-aspiring chef now reduced to working as a house sitter for wealthy clients in New York. Although we’re told she’s pretending to live other people’s lives instead of living her own (this sentiment is repeated several times), Anna’s energetic, can-do attitude belies the notion that she’s stuck in an existential rut. The unlikely set of circumstances that lead her to fly to Tuscany and sneak into the elegant, empty villa of Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor), a charming international businessman with whom she had a one-night stand in New York, are not worth getting into; suffice it to say that Matteo is not there, but Anna is soon discovered by his family, who then assume that she’s Matteo’s new fiancée, and she decides to play along. So it’s basically While You Were Sleeping (1995), without the coma, the stalking, or Chicago. Anna’s ruse does require some sneaking around, and Bailey proves to be a gifted physical comedian, which is both a blessing and a curse: It makes you wish the film leaned more in that slapstick direction.

Among the family is Michael (the ridiculously handsome Regé-Jean Page), Matteo’s cousin-slash-brother (again, long story), who owns a vineyard and with whom Anna immediately gets off on the wrong foot, even though their attraction is also immediate. Director Kat Coiro clearly knows on which side her bread is buttered, so she makes sure to give us a few slow-motion shots of Michael, including one where he lends Anna the shirt off his back during a sudden storm so she can preserve the edges in her hair. Page doesn’t exactly have to emote here: Mostly, he gets to stand around looking pretty, confident, and occasionally standoffish, and he happens to be really good at that. He and Matteo have a rather intense sibling rivalry, we learn, much of it focused on a barrel-roll race scheduled for the final day of a local festival. (You get one guess as to what the third act of this film involves.) 

You, Me & Tuscany seems manufactured in a lab to hit all the typical rom-com pleasure points, which can occasionally be charming, but it’s all so programmatic that the movie never manages to breathe. Because Anna and Matteo were never actually together, her clear attraction with Michael doesn’t face any meaningful obstacles, aside from some obligatory (and weakly justified) initial sniping between the two leads. Similarly, the fact that Matteo’s family owns a local restaurant basically telegraphs another third-act resolution, when the film suddenly transforms into a food movie so our aspiring-chef heroine can realize her dreams. Spoiler, sure, but c’mon. Every plot point is so clearly itemized and delivered on that I can’t decide if the picture is underbaked (that is to say, not fully fleshed out) or overdone (sanded down to its essence and stripped of anything resembling spontaneity). Maybe it’s a little of both: a simulacrum of rom-com elements without the emotional conduits required to give it life.

Still, the film has a warm-hued pleasantness that, like that aforementioned robot boy and his mom, reminds us of the incidental pleasures of the rom-com genre. The Tuscan landscape looks lovely, and the film demonstrates a generosity toward its characters that, let’s face it, feels like a balm when the real world can be so stupid and rough. (My press screening happened on the eve of the U.S. president’s insane rants about wiping out Iran and its civilization.) Matteo’s family accepts Anna pretty much immediately, and even though she’s deceiving them, we never really buy the idea that they’re somehow going to turn on her when the truth comes out; even characters that initially seem poised to be villains are quickly rendered harmless. This is, of course, a virtue on one level but a problem on another. (Such are the paradoxes of the rom-com genre, which traffics in familiarity and reassurance and where predictability can sometimes be an asset.) Nobody ever feels like a real person in this movie, but we’re pulling for them anyway. The same could be said for the film: It’s not particularly good, but I selfishly want it to be a hit anyway, just so we can bask in the genre for a little longer. The world was a better place when rom-coms roamed the land.