If I started listing everything that annoyed me about Kat Coiro’s
You, Me & Tuscany it’d start sounding like my reaction was more negative than it was. It’s a big, bright, broad romantic comedy and grooves along pleasantly. It has a cute leading lady (Halle Bailey) playing an aspiring chef who cashes out her meager savings to visit Tuscany. Once there she crashes in a vacant villa and is promptly mistaken for the owner’s fiancé. She decides to go with it because the big stereotypical Italian family are so welcoming and lovely—and travel into each scene en masse like the family in the
Big Fat Greek Wedding movies. (No wonder Nia Vardalos cameos in the first scene). As she learns to love life under the Tuscan sun, our heroine’s quickly attracted to a handsome vineyard owner (Regé-Jean Page) who feels a connection with her but doesn’t pursue it, thinking she’s engaged and all. Quite a conundrum. But it’ll work itself out more or less how you’d expect. There’s something to be said for the comforting rhythms of formula storytelling. It almost carries the movie over low-res establishing shots, clunky ADR exposition, flat chemistry from the leads, and a supporting friend character who exists almost exclusively to repeat plot points over FaceTime. Funnily enough for a movie about a wannabe chef, it just adds to a feeling that the whole thing is just a little undercooked, under-spiced, and on too low a boil. It’s the kind of middling dish that gets the job done, but doesn’t truly satisfy. But how often do we get rom-coms that rise to even that level these days, especially in a theater?
Kristoffer Borgli’s
The Drama is also technically a romantic comedy, insofar as it is about romance and has a consistently percolating sense of humor bubbling over into hugely funny moments. But to call it a rom-com would lead potential viewers astray. For all its surface gloss and handsome New York apartments, this is a spiky, prickly movie about a relationship on the brink of marriage and the precipice of disaster. It’s the week of the wedding and the happy couple are given a trust exercise. Name the worst thing you’ve ever done. Big mistake. Robert Pattinson’s flustered Brit — he’s giving 90’s Hugh Grant — becomes slightly, slowly, then all at once undone by the admission of his fiancé (Zendaya). I shan’t spoil her answer, but it’s worth mentioning the movie’s tricky tone and prankish social satire comes out of the sheer liability of the leads and the jolt of electric discourse that their confessions inspire. The movie smirks as it watches others with comparable, or worse, behaviors get sanctimonious, and as it finds characters asking if you can ever really know another person. Here’s a movie about the baggage everyone carries, and how difficult it can be to open it up for someone, even the closest someones, knowing that you’re risking judgment. And, if you’re getting married, you know their baggage will be weighing you down, too. It allows scenes of usual pre-marriage jitters to compound the stress through squirming social situations and escalating psychological sweatiness. The movie’s a sly conversation starter like that, tossing up awkward behaviors and philosophical posturing and watching as the characters flail to get back to a livable normal. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
