SPOILER-FREE PLOT SUMMARY
Chef-turned-professional-house-sitter Anna (played by Halle Bailey) starts to take on the lives of her clients while they’re away and continues to get in trouble for it. After her latest firing, she heads to a hotel bar where she meets a traveling real estate agent, Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor), who tells her about his abandoned villa in Tuscany, Italy. Before he heads off to Japan for work, he encourages her to come visit sometime. Being between jobs, Anna decides there’s no time like the present, uses the ticket her late mom had bought her for their planned trip to Tuscany, and shows up during the annual Summer Festival, the busiest week of the year for the area. As a result, she finds there are zero lodging options for her spur-of-the-moment trip. Being a house sitter — and knowing it isn’t being lived in — she desperately resorts to squatting at Matteo’s house. But, when his mom (Isabella Ferrari) and grandma (Stefania Casini) arrive to clean it, she winds up introducing herself as his fiancee and she quickly finds herself, once again, living a false life. With Matteo absent and the family wanting to get to know their soon-to-be relative, his brother Michael (Regé-Jean Page) is left to show Anna around and the two begin to have real feelings for each other. Little does he know, she’s living a lie that could effect the entire family once the truth comes out.
SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
First things first, Bailey and Page are great. You get a sense of their chemistry and actively root for them to get together despite the complications of the situation at hand. As good as they are, most of the hilarity is driven by side characters like Aunt Francesca, the taxi driver or Anna’s best friend back in New York.
With most comedies going straight to streaming, it’s great to see a good traditional rom com on the big screen where laughter is infectious as opposed to a small one where focus can be easily broken. There’s so much charm and fun packed into the 105-minute run time that it makes you long for the days of yore when everything went into theaters months before being available at home. If you can find a cinema with at least a decent crowd, your experience will be far better than waiting for YOU, ME & TUSCANY to hit streaming.
It should be noted that, while a highly enjoyable watch, this is hardly perfect filmmaking. There’s a lot of ADR throughout, there’s a certain level of cheesiness sprinkled in and I hope you have “shirtless (and wet) male lead” on your bingo card because you can go ahead and mark that space.
Additionally, the movie feels “thin” at times. Without giving anything away — this is a spoiler-free review, after all — Anna spends hours helping yet has a perfectly clean apron and clothes afterward. Also, there are landmarks visited that have almost no tourists, there are zero extras in public hallways and, toward the end, I’m not sure Bailey is actually standing in the vineyard. When the camera is on Page, everything’s fine, but when it’s on Bailey, it feels like she’s in front of a green screen.
Director Kat Coiro delivers a sweet, charming and hilarious film here and, if you love the genre, YOU, ME & TUSCANY is not to be missed. The chemistry works, the family dynamics hit perfect and the audience genuinely doesn’t know how Anna and Michael’s story is going to turn out.
While not perfect, YOU, ME & TUSCANY is a great example of what more of the rom com genre should aspire to be.
JKG SCORE: 7.0
Untitled Film Project 