★★ (2 out of 4)
Now playing in theaters on its way to in-flight viewing, “You, Me and Tuscany” evaporates while you’re watching it. Still, pretty people in pretty places have been part of the Hollywood diet since romcoms were invented. So why stop now?
A free-spirited, young chef named Anna makes a brash decision to become a squatter in an abandoned Tuscan villa owned by a man she barely knows, leading to a whole new world of adventure, lies, and love when she meets Michael, the homeowner's cousin. Feed this algorithm into ChatGPT and a similar story suitable for filming would surely emerge.
At least, it has here from producer Will Packer who packaged “Girls Trip” into a hit. Halle Bailey (Say it fast and you hear Halle Berry.), the songbird star of the live action “Beauty and the Beast” and the film of the Broadway musical “The Color Purple,” stars as Anna. And in this new Packer package, Anna finds love in Tuscany with Michael, played by Regé-Jean Page, the British-Zimbabwean actor who’s been setting hearts a flutter since 2020 when he starred as Simon Basset, the Duke of Hastings, on the first season of “Bridgerton.”
How could Bailey and Page fail to steam up the screen under the Tuscan sun? I don’t know, but fail they do, generating something closer to a brother-sister vibe. Don’t get me wrong, the two stars are perfectly pleasant company, but hardly the stuff of passion unleashed. Did director Kat Coiro skip the chemistry read or something?
I will skip the description of how and Anna get together—you can thank me later—assuming Ryan Engle assembled the script from a how-to manual on connect-the-dots screenwriting. The upshot is that Anna is squatting in a Tuscan villa that isn’t hers, forcing her to tell the owner’s stereotypical Italian family that she—mamma mia!—is engaged to their absent son with whom she enjoyed only a one-night stand.
A romcom that evaporates while you’re watching it
Everyone is happy until Anna falls for Black-Italian winemaking cousin-brother Michael (Page) after pages of script where they pretend not to like each other to put some juice into the opposites-attract formula. The juice never comes, but they get together anyway, being that they appear to be the only Blacks in all of Tuscany.
The sexiest scenes in the film involve food, as Anna agrees to replace a member of Michael’s family in a cooking contest at the local summer festival, with Anna going back to her roots to prepare a pot of shrimp and grits that dazzles the Italians.
When even the pasta can’t stop the plot strings from loosening and sagging, which is more often than not, the director cuts to endless drone shots of the Italian countryside. Shameless, but effective.
If you have family that likes to show you smartphone photos of scenery without people, you’ll get the drift of what’s happening in “You, Me and Tuscany.” Page, forced into shirtless scenes (an Emmy nominee deserves better), smiles bravely at Bailey while she fake grins right back at him until they both look like they’ll die if the charade goes on for another minute. Audiences will know the feeling.