You, Me & Tuscany

Grade: C

The last movie I saw before You, Me & Tuscany was a limited release film called Fantasy Life, which could have been YM&T’s title. It may be a more apropos name for it than the one that uses the title. You, Me & Tuscany, unfortunately, turned out to be exactly like the trailer made it look. It’s about a woman who spends an entire movie taking advantage of a lifestyle, and pretending to be something she’s not. Everybody believes her, and since we already know the real deal, there’s nothing for the viewer to do but wait impatiently for the truth to come out in a cheap reveal near the end.

Even when we first meet Anna (Halle Bailey – Ariel from 2023’s The Little Mermaid, and Young Nettie in The Color Purple), she’s already living a fantasy life. We see her walking a dog and wearing nice clothes in New York City. They don’t belong to her. She is (or now, was) a professional house sitter. After being let go, and hanging out at a hotel bar while her phone is charging, Anna meets Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor).

We learn their backstories. She has aspirations to be a chef, and almost graduated culinary school, when she had to drop out due to her mother getting sick and ultimately passing. He is in the midst of a prodigal son journey, having recently fleed without notice from his family in Tuscany, including the nice villa he has there. He invites her up to his room. He falls asleep before anything can take place. When she wakes up the next morning, he is gone, but has left a note – encouraging her to follow her dream and maybe use that plane ticket to Tuscany her late mother had gifted her.

She does, and – having nowhere else to stay – sneaks into Matteo’s villa. Snooping around, she finds and puts on an engagement ring – an old family heirloom. When people arrive and discover her there, wearing the ring, they assume she is Matteo’s fiancée, and he will be coming home soon to celebrate. This is the part she spends the rest of the movie playing.

The family is quirkily lovable and adorable, just like a certain big fat Greek family. They each have their own trademark running joke or one-liner, and they materialize everywhere, right on cue, like a big fat Greek chorus, to deliver their bits. Another obvious comparison is While You Were Sleeping, which had Sandra Bullock continuously playing out a charade because she fell in love with the family. I liked both of those films. Something is missing in the translation to Tuscany, and I suspect it’s the lame, unconvincing, silly Hallmark angle that bogs it down.

Matters get more complicated when Anna begins to fall for Matteo’s cousin/adopted brother Michael, played by Regé-Jean Page. Anna and Michael are deep in a vineyard when the sprinklers come on, causing Michael to take his shirt off and receive gawking from women on a tourist tram that pulls up at the perfect time. This happens twice, not counting the outtakes of unused lines, shown during the end credits. An awful lot of airtime is devoted to the Anna/Michael subplot, while other, more interesting developments aren’t given space to take off.

All that’s missing from the final scenes are the sentimental sitcom music, à la Full House, and the sound of a studio audience going “awwww” in unison. The premise and situations in You, Me & Tuscany are unbelievable, doing absolutely nothing original or innovative. The ending will be revelatory for you if you’ve never seen a movie before. I wouldn’t have been letting a big cat out of the bag if I’d disclosed what happens. The true spoiler is that it plays out exactly how you’d predict.

Grade: C