You, Me & Tuscany Delivers Everything It Promises—Including Tomatoes

Tomato porn. If you’re into tomatoes—the way they look tumbling from a basket at the market, or heaped on a platter at the dinner table, or diced and salted and spilling off a slice of crusty white bread—you’re probably part of the target audience for You, Me & Tuscany, a ridiculous but wholly enjoyable romantic comedy in which a peppy but rudderless young woman from New York City, Halle Bailey’s Anna, finds love in the Italian countryside. Beautiful young people, stunning scenery, and—did I mention?—unreally gorgeous tomatoes: none of these are negligible movie pleasures, and You, Me & Tuscany—directed by Kat Coiro and written by husband-and-wife team Ryan Engle and Kristin Engle—serves them up unapologetically.

Anna has found herself adrift since the death of her mother, a chef. The two had dreamed of eating their way through Italy; now that dream has been dashed, and Anna, who dropped out of cooking school to care for her ailing mom, now makes a meager living working as a house sitter. It’s a way, she admits, of “borrowing other people’s lives.” One evening, as she’s eating a hamburger at a hotel bar—she’s handed the bartender a stack of credit cards, figuring the payment will go through on at least one—she catches the eye of a handsome gent across the way. His name is Matteo (he’s played by Lorenzo de Moor), and he’s from Italy, traveling on business. They talk; there are hints of romance. He learns that she’d dreamed of visiting his home country with her mother, and urges her to follow through on her own. He also tells her he has a villa in the Italian countryside, just sitting empty. Anna decides Matteo is right about seizing the moment. She’s got 500 bucks in the bank and a plane ticket that had been bought before her mother’s death. Why not?

The problem is that Anna arrives in Matteo’s small, quaint town during a popular festival week, without having made a hotel reservation. She remembers that Matteo had mentioned an empty villa. Wasn’t that an open invitation to stay there? It wasn’t—but she locates the joint, finds the key hidden in a flower pot (where else?), and lets herself in, getting a good night’s sleep in Matteo’s fluffy bed, wearing his exquisite Italian pajamas. She also finds a diamond ring in a junk drawer, which she tries on with great delight, only to forget she’s wearing it.

You can guess that a calamity will ensue, even before Anna encounters a stern nonna (Stefania Casini) shaking a feather duster at her. You may also be guessing that a romance with Matteo is in the cards for Anna. But you haven’t accounted for the presence of a dashing local, Regé-Jean Page's Michael, a half-English, half-Italian charmer who also happens to own a vineyard. At one point, he gets caught in the sudden faux-rainstorm of a sprinkler system, and he peels off his wet shirt to reveal a sleek, rippling, sun-dappled chest dotted with water droplets. Anna can hardly believe what she sees, and I’m betting the audience for You, Me & Tuscany will feel the same.

The plot is ridiculous, but not much more so than in many of the classic romantic comedies of the 1930s, where mistaken identities, goofy misunderstandings, and minor deceptions were just the handy little cogs that kept stories going. (It all comes from Shakespeare, anyway.)  You could argue, pedantically, that what Anna does is really, really bad, as well as illegal: her crimes include breaking and entering, temporary theft of precious jewelry, and misleading a whole village into believing she’s someone she’s not. But Bailey’s Anna shrugs it all off with an innocent smile, and you can’t be too hard on her. Bailey is a sunny, likable presence, with Bambi eyelashes out to there; you can’t help wanting the best for her character, which includes, of course, a return to the thing she loves most, cooking. Between the romantic fantasy of Anna and her two swains, the swoony Tuscan locales bathed in creamy golden light, and the tomatoes, You, Me & Tuscany delivers everything its title promises. Once in a while, there is truth in advertising.