You, Me & Tuscany
Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page headline a daft, derivative and generic romcom that sets the genre back by twenty years.
Campari courting: Regé-Jean Page and Halle Bailey
Image courtesy of Universal Studios.
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
It’s an unfortunate quirk of fate that You, Me & Tuscany opened just one week after The Drama. Both are romcoms starring a mixed-race American singer-actress teamed with an English beau. But The Drama is so, so much more. You, Me & Tuscany looks like a Campari commercial reaching for the spark of Mamma Mia! but without the joy of the Abba songs. For Heaven’s sake, there’s even a taxi driver called Lorenzo – always the same taxi driver – who exclaims “Mamma mia!” when first we meet him. Every cliché is up for the count, mio amico.
Halle Bailey (Ariel in The Little Mermaid) plays Anna Montgomery, tapping into the vibe of a young Queen Latifah. Anna is a manipulative, insincere, dishonest and self-entitled piece of work, a really unpleasant person to spend more than five minutes with. But she is pretty, in a young Queen Latifah sort of way, and attracts the attention of an Italian charmer called Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor) for a cringe-meet moment in a New York hotel bar. One thing leads to another and Anna finds herself in Matteo’s hotel room, when he passes out on the bed. In the morning she discovers a romantic note from him and is inspired to fly to Italy that evening, without so much as a visa or ETA or a return ticket (only in the movies, right?).
Being a lowly house sitter, Anna barely has a Euro to her name, and when she pitches up at Matteo’s home town in Tuscany, she’s hard put to find a hotel room. So she opts to break into Matteo’s empty luxury villa (she has photographs on her phone), having found the housekeys under a flower pot. She then helps herself to the amenities, washing machine and master bedroom and, needless to say, is caught red-handed the next morning as she tries to scale down a drainpipe. Ignoring this obvious display of guilt, Matteo’s Madre (Isabella Ferrari) and Nonna (an excellent Stefania Casini) accept her explanation that she is in fact Matteo’s fiancée who has arrived early to plan their wedding. The question is how to keep up this façade, before she can disentangle herself and find the money for a return flight to New York…
It’s hard to know how seriously to take the shenanigans that follow, whether or not the film is aiming at self-parody or attempting to be a seriously romantic comedy, complete with its range of exaggerated comic performances. Pity poor Regé-Jean Page (Simon Basset in Bridgerton) who attempts to keep a straight face as Matteo’s half-brother Michael, even when displaying his eight-pack in the vineyards of Tuscany. John Debney’s exasperating score doesn’t help, as it underlines every dramatic and comic beat, while the romantic bits are clipped straight out of other movies. If endless close-ups of Italian food, endless shots of vineyards bathed in sunlight and the occasional naked male torso are your bag, then this might not be a total waste of time. But the level of artificiality and skin-crawling anomalies are likely to reduce most sophisticated filmgoers to tears.
Cast: Halle Bailey, Regé-Jean Page, Marco Calvani, Lorenzo de Moor, Aziza Scott, Nia Vardalos, Paolo Sassanelli, Stefania Casini, Tommaso Cassissa, Stella Pecollo, Emanuele Pacca, Desirée Pöpper, Joy Bryant.
Dir Kat Coiro, Pro Will Packer and Johanna Byer, Screenplay Ryan Engle, Ph Danny Ruhlmann, Pro Des Elena Albanese, Ed Troy Takaki, Music John Debney, Costumes Massimo Cantini Parrini, Sound Pat Haskill, Dialect coach Benjamin Shilling.
Will Packer Productions-Universal Pictures.
104 mins. USA. 2026. UK and US Rel: 10 April 2026. Cert. 12A.
