FILM REVIEW
YOU, ME & TUSCANY
RatedPG-13
104 Minutes
Released April 10th
The “Little Mermaid” meets “Simon, Duke of Hastings from Bridgerton,” and they get hosed down in an Italian vineyard!
It could have been as hard to believe as it sounds, but the setting of the film and the Italian supporting cast paint a background you can’t resist. Rege-Jean Page plays “Michael,” a member of the younger generation of a family that owns a vineyard estate in Tuscany, and Halle Bailey is “Anna,” a young New Yorker who can’t seem to get her life going on a forward trajectory.
Through a series of unintended incidents and mistaken assumptions common to rom-coms, Anna ends up staying at the villa of this family vineyard. Michael is the handsome but still humble and hard-working vineyard owner, and Anna is the cute and quirky heroine who seems to repeatedly mess up her communications and end up in cringy situations.
Bailey brings to Anna an impish personality that would fit perfectly into Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She has that sense of comedy with a sadness lurking behind it, which makes her perfect for this role of Anna, who has just lost someone very close to her and can’t seem to settle down, but never loses her ability to laugh. Anna is a 180-degree turn from Page’s love interest in Bridgerton, who was a proper noblewoman. In contrast, Anna is someone who gets herself into predicaments constantly and uses her magnetic personality to escape from them.
Page is a charismatic actor who is just coming into his own identity as a star. He was born to a white English preacher and a Zimbabwean nurse in Harare, Zimbabwe (a country in southeast Africa). Page spent his childhood in Harare, attending elementary school there, and then his parents moved to London, where he attended secondary school. His goal was to be a sound engineer, taking courses at Northern Technical College.
Meanwhile, as a hobby, he took up acting. He went on auditions for fun, but after two years of being seen by casting directors, he decided to get serious about the craft. He enrolled at Drama Centre London. Page secured his first role on British TV in 2001. He then moved to LA, where Shonda Rhimes gave him a supporting role in her series For the People. He was then cast in the first season of the immensely popular Shondaland series Bridgerton.
Bailey was raised in Mableton, Georgia, a diverse suburban town northwest of Atlanta, although her family has deep roots in South Carolina. Her acting and musical careers began to take shape when she was just three years old. Her Dad taught her to write songs along with her sister Chloe. Both sisters became Series Regulars on Grown-ish for four seasons. Halle then won fame as “Ariel” in the live-action feature The Little Mermaid in 2023, and she played “Young Nettie” in The Color Purple, also in 2023. She and her sister continue to write songs, and she counts Beyoncé as a mentor.
The supporting cast of Italian actors are really stars in this movie. The writer has given them personalities that do much more than move the story. They are the highlights, adding to the humanity and the comedy. Led by revered Italian film and TV legends Paolo Sassanelli and Stefania Casini, the multiple members of the family who own the vineyard, and the dryly comedic taxi driver give the movie an uplifting warmth.
Director Kat Coiro knows how to shoot a film on the cheap in Italy and turn out an award-winning crowd-pleaser. Her first feature, And While We Were Here, was shot on a budget of $150K in 2012 over the span of 11 days in Tuscany while she was 8 months pregnant, and that film went on to win awards. Coiro started her career as an actress, and after one stint playing a “Wood Nymph” in Charmed, she moved to the other side of the camera.
You, Me & Tuscany is already winning the hearts of audiences. It’s a genuinely fun movie with just enough depth to make it real, and characters whose stories are identifiable to most anyone. It’s a classic big-city-girl goes to a small village and disrupts the flow of life story. It could have been set anywhere, but the decision to make Tuscany, with its gorgeous landscapes and sunrises, one of the main characters of this tale, is fortunate. Watch for the extraordinary drone shots of the Tuscan countryside that appear from time to time, just often enough to remind us of where we are.
This is a production where race disappears gracefully, as it does in Grey’s Anatomy, and it’s refreshing to see. Watching this movie, I didn’t feel a huge amount of chemistry between the two stars. However, each of them has an extraordinary connection with the audience that more than makes up for that.
Kathryn Whitney Boole has spent most of her life in the entertainment industry, which has been the backdrop for remarkable adventures with extraordinary people. She is a Talent Manager with Studio Talent Group in Santa Monica. kboole@gmail.com
