‘You, Me & Tuscany’ Review: Here’s Your Next Airplane Movie

Kat Coiro's Italy-set romantic comedy features charismatic turns from Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page. It looks and feels like a streaming movie suited and soothing for the skies, despite its on-location European textures.

If you’ve ever wondered what it could feel like to live inside the bubble of an Olivia Dean song — that hesitant fizz of new romance, all wrapped up in the blandly reassuring earworm of a major key — here is the movie for you. Director Kat Coiro’s wholesome, well-meaning rom-com “You, Me & Tuscany” transports a bottoming-out Gen Z housesitter-to-the-wealthy named Anna (Halle Bailey) on a dream delusion of a trip to Italy, where she meets a charming winemaker played by profoundly handsome “Bridgerton” breakout Regé-Jean Page.

A wish fulfillment in feature-film-shaped form and little else, “You, Me & Tuscany” isn’t especially memorable or surprising, but there’s a soothing, smoothed-over quality to this film — which was shot on-location in Tuscany, so points for that — that makes it a suitable candidate for your next airplane viewing instead of reaching for another Lorazepam. And one where, unlike so many other similar options, you won’t be hoping the plane goes down. The shots are competently composed, the lighting bright, the beats familiar and unchallenging in any way.

Reeling from the earlier, offscreen death of her mother, who left Anna with a blank-check plane ticket for what was supposed to be their mother-daughter trip to Tuscany, Anna is a dream-crashed aspiring chef who can’t pay her rent. It’s not even clear where or how she lives. She ekes whatever means she can out of tending to the apartment of a Hamptons-bound rich woman, played by Nia Vardalos, who busts in on Anna wearing her lingerie and acting like she owns the place. This woman fires her immediately.

Anna’s friend Claire (Aziza Scott) works at a fancy hotel whose largesse keeps this literally poor girl in discounted burgers and an occasional place to crash. Anna (whose real name we will find out later) hooks up with a dashing Italian called Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor) at said bar, who hints at a vacant villa in Tuscany while encouraging Anna to eat, pray, love her way to Italy anyway despite her mother’s death.

That’s also despite the fact that Anna has about $500 in her bank account, a totally unrealistic sum to potentially sustain a voyage to Italy where a cab alone apparently runs to the cool tune of 200 euros. But this is an escapist rom-com, anyway, right? So there’s no use in dwelling on the details, and there’s nothing like one-way airfare to bust your life open anyway.

Once in Tuscany at a gorgeous palatial spread of a home she casually manages to break into, Anna is greeted by Matteo’s squabbling, touchy family, who view him as the prodigal son and for whom his life in New York, away from them, is now a painful sore spot. How to get out of an awkward situation in order to avoid booking that plane ticket back to New York, where nothing much awaits her, after conning her way into a stranger’s home? Pretend to be Matteo’s fiancée, and get the family to love you. And fast.

Which she does, but there’s a wrinkle in the fabric of her terrible plan: an impossibly good-looking winemaker named Michael (Page), seemingly the only Black person in Italy besides her. She convinces him, too, that she’s engaged to marry Matteo, but they form an unavoidable spark ignited by a drunken afternoon of aperitivo and generous wine-tasting. Matteo eventually shows up but decides it’s better to keep the ruse going to appease his family, which includes a suspicious nonna.

Bailey and Page have chemistry enough to keep the charade, too, of this movie going, and it’s impressive how committed Anna is to her absolutely insane bit posing as an entirely fake person in order to stay at an Italian family’s gorgeous home. She forms a friendship with a flamboyant cab driver played by “Four Seasons” breakout Marco Calvani, who is funny as ever despite a broad, even stereotypical role.

What elevates “You, Me & Tuscany” above the stable of uninspiring rom-coms it’s riffing off — which include, of course, the beloved Diane Lane vehicle “Under the Tuscan Sun” — is director Coiro’s taste and touch for real textures. But that’s sort of… all they are? The film was shot on location in Italy, dousing the viewer in a delicious moving pageantry of pasta and focaccia sandwiches. The New York sequences early in the film were mounted on a soundstage at Cinecittà, the Rome-adjacent studios where everyone from Federico Fellini to Mel Gibson has filmed, where a hopefully decent tax credit is now on offer for American productions.

That a white woman (Coiro) and a white man (Ryan Engle) directed and wrote this film, respectively, is certainly something given the occasional, powdered-on specificity of dialogue and references built around a Black experience. Anna is very concerned about her edges and hair getting ruined by the sprinklers gone off in the vineyard that lead to her first moment of physical connection with Michael — but still, that doesn’t add up to this movie really feeling like it’s for anybody in particular.

And you can’t shake the feeling that “You, Me & Tuscany” isn’t much better than the streaming rom-coms it’s slyly wanting to rebuke for the sake of putting the genre back in theaters — though with many a close-up on luscious plates of food that could inspire tickets booked to Italy the same way that “The White Lotus” has ruined Sicily and wherever else for everybody. Anna reactivates her zest for cooking when Matteo’s father unexpectedly must drop out of cooking the final meal at the local summer festival, with Anna moving to prepare a nontraditional pot of shrimp and grits to the unexpected glee of those who’re tasting it.

Can you find the truth about yourself in living a fake life? That’s the question posed by “You, Me & Tuscany” with a vague gesture, the only character really given an inner life of questions and complexity being Anna herself. “The Little Mermaid” and “Grown-ish” breakout Halle Bailey exudes enough charisma to justify the trip, even if it’s not one you’re going to take again. Unless, of course, there’s not much else on the airplane streaming platform. She pumps the character with the peppy self-deception of a classic screwball rom-com heroine, in a world where “most of the men are handsome winemakers,” as Michael tells her, but she’s predictably found the one who’s the most unlucky in love. Cue another pratfall and embarrassing infelicity once she realizes she’s in over her head. Again.

Someone walking out of the theater behind me said this movie was “something light and fun.” Nowadays, that fits the bill. “You, Me & Tuscany” offers you under two hours to set aside your problems and leave your brain behind. Doesn’t that sound nice?

Grade: C+

“You, Me & Tuscany” opens in theaters Friday, April 10.

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