You, Me & Tuscany review – slick romcom offers solidly charming getaway

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You, Me & Tuscany is a perfectly wholesome and harmless meet-cute that starts by asking: “What if the Little Mermaid had a Lady and the Tramp-style hookup with the season one heart-throb from Bridgerton, spaghetti and all?”

Halle Bailey is Anna, hopelessly navigating life after the death of her mother, torn between the worlds of adult responsibility and inner child whimsy. A freelance hustle as a house sitter helps make ends meet, but her impulse to fully inhabit her clients’ lives constantly threatens her livelihood. A gig watching over a spectacular Central Park West apartment seems out of a dream. But it quickly goes awry when the lady of the house (Nia Vardalos in a sly cameo) returns early and catches Anna cosplaying as a Park Avenue princess in her premium lingerie. Embarrassed, Anna retreats into the arms of her bestie Claire (Aziza Scott of One of Them Days), the luxury hotel clerk whose barbed sisterly advice is well worth enduring for the one-liners and the potential discount on a short-term residency.

While drowning her sorrows at the hotel bar over a beer and burger, meticulously ordered because she’s a culinary school dropout, Anna bonds with Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor), a dashing Italian man who has come to New York to hide away from the pressure of running the family business, though he still carries a torch for his idyllic Tuscany home.

When jet lag derails a boozy tryst, Matteo leaves a letter behind in the morning urging Anna to take that bucket list trip to Tuscany. Naturally, she does what any young drifter would with a one-way ticket already in hand: she makes a nest in Matteo’s villa, passing herself off as his American fiancee. Who knows, shrugs Lorenzo (Marco Calvani), the bubbly Tuscan cabby who becomes Anna’s closest shoulder to cry on. “By living a fake life you might find truth in your own – or you’ll go to prison.”

The accidental scammer set-up is just an appetizer for a full course feast of Italian getaway romcom tropes. Director Kat Coiro dutifully fills the nearly two-hour film with golden-hour panoramas of slender cypress trees and stucco estates and reserves the tightest closeups for the vino and risotto. Tuscany becomes its own character, as does the adorable Fiat Topolino taxi Anna uses to zip across the vista’s dusty rolling hills. Its name, Cucci (pronounced “coochie”), scans as a slick wink from producer Will Packer to Black viewers in particular of the lust just around the corner.

The fake engagement heightens the flirtations between Anna and Michael (Regé-Jean Page), Matteo’s cousin and a devoted anchor for the Tuscan family in his absence. But their simmering romance crackles with more heat than steak. Michael’s mannequin beauty and bilingual fluency are a heady combo – but they don’t fully make up for a fundamental deficit in natural charm. Meanwhile, Anna seems more enchanted by the idea of life with Michael than by Michael himself – a pedantic winemaker with a jones for the 2004 R&B hit Let Me Love You by Mario.

But if the buzz around this film is any indication, the true stakes of the makeshift love triangle between Anna, Matteo and Michael aren’t its immediate impact on the family (turns out, they’re pretty forgiving and preoccupied with their own petty dramas). Evidently, it’s the future of the Hollywood romcom that hangs in the balance.

Ahead of You, Me & Tuscany’s theatrical release, several romcom creators have admitted that their own scripts wouldn’t see the light of day unless this film delivered a first-week knockout at the box office. (As if there wasn’t enough pressure on the genre.) To hear them tell it, their refreshed takes on the genre lean heavily into diversity and cultural specificity; they hold You, Me & Tuscany as the ultimate proof of concept – a notion that’s as outlandish as it is believable: that the industry may have suddenly forgotten all the money made on Crazy Rich Asians and the Think Like a Man franchise.

As much as Packer tries to deliver his version of Under the Tuscan Sun, at the end of the day he’s just the frontman. Remove Bailey and Page – avatars for a global majority clamoring to see themselves reflected in such fantasies – or Scott, who ladles in heaps of her own Black girl magic despite sadly limited screen time, and what you’re left with is a romcom written, directed and produced by white people, for nobody in particular. The cultural play was secondary in other words, which makes the Little Mermaid-Bridgerton mashup the real hook – better for streaming than theaters, ultimately.

At a time when the industry appears less inclined than ever to gamble on grand movie-making gestures, let alone indulgent tourism porn, banking all hope on a spendy paint-by-numbers romcom with a fresh color palette feels like a sure-fire recipe for heartbreak – especially when this whimsical trip is worth taking as priced.