What actually is a rom-com?
If you were to listen to You, Me & Tuscany director Kat Coiro and writer Ryan Engle, the answer would probably be pretty simple and familiar: being pretty, simple and familiar.
For example, the story of a down-and-out, eminently relatable — and improbably beautiful —young woman stumbling through life after a tragedy. That woman serendipitously finds her way to Italy via a plane ticket purchased by her since-deceased mother, then has a meet-cute with a requisitely handsome but gruff and standoffish local.
That’s followed by an emotional song, a revelation about who they really are and …
Well, I’ll let you guess what happens next.
WATCH | You, Me & Tuscany trailer:
Which really shouldn’t be all that difficult for anyone with even a passing familiarity of the mistaken-identity-into-love genre. But it’s that predictability that seems to be the undergirding this whole thing.
A formulaic familiarity that seeps through both this cute, often comedic and completely contrived feature — and the perpetual “return of the rom-com!” discourse that seems to pop back up every year like a bad blackhead.
And like a blackhead, You, Me & Tuscany is hardly the worst thing that could happen to you. Still, while barely noticeable, exceedingly common and hardly worth a passing thought, it would still probably be better if it — and this specific flavour of surface-level, escapist rom-com in general — didn’t exist.
This is not because of anything horrible or offensive in the plot or performance. Halle Bailey is charming and sympathetic as Anna, a New York culinary school dropout-turned-professional house sitter, dreaming of a gastronomical trip to Tuscany.
And Regé-Jean Page, as well, is solid enough as Michael, the confusingly single winemaker and obvious love interest on whom she stumbles hours after her spur-of-the-moment arrival in Italy.
In fact, he’s nearly as solid as the conceit on which this whole thing rests; in that oft-revisited comic misunderstanding seen as recently as last year’s Elio and far back as Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Anna trips and stumbles into a lie about who she really is.
Because just before leaving on this impromptu trip, she similarly stumbles into rich realtor Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor), a transplant estranged from his Tuscan family.
And given his hints that his villa sits unoccupied while he jet-sets around the globe, Anna’s brilliant idea of breaking in and sleeping there during the incredibly crowded summer festival soon becomes a poorly thought-out reality.
Predictably enough, when Matteo’s family finds her sleeping in his bed, she is forced into a lie: that she and Matteo are engaged, and he is headed home to reconcile with them all ahead of the wedding.
A doubly misguided lie, as she soon finds out that none other than dreamboat hunk Michael is Matteo’s adoptive brother.
Romantic tropes
So what’s so wrong with a romantic comedy structured around a hero lying to their love interest? It worked well enough in You’ve Got Mail, didn’t it? Or Anastasia? Or Aladdin, The Fighting Temptations, Maid in Manhattan, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Never Been Kissed, She’s The Man, She’s All That…
Obviously, it’s enough of a hallmark to alone justify the name of serial rom-com offender Hallmark. But it’s also tightly tied to a time period: the 1990s to early aughts romantic comedy boom that more or less established the formula: codifying the filmic styles and mores of a specific window of time as a genre of its own.
It’s obvious throughout Tuscany — there’s seemingly a concerted effort to keep anything beyond iPhones from modernizing a storyline you could have watched 20 years ago.
The jokey cast around Anna are simultaneously so flat and cartoonish they seem added as afterthoughts: an Italian gardener gets no more character traits than belting out opera arias, while several family members completely contradict their established personalities in order to arbitrarily instigate plot-necessary fist fights, force Anna to confront her fears and cook gigantic dinners — or save her from consequences they’d hoped would destroy her for the entire runtime.
To be fair, they are contrived and comedic characters in a purposely simple and silly film. But they — within a comedy of errors that feels so low-stakes it’s sometimes hard to remember what’s actually at risk — all feel like an echo of other rom-coms Coiro and Engle are merely trying to remind you of.
The film intentionally resists subversion, evolution or literally any updates that could constitute a surprise — instead scripting increasingly dated potboilers you could nearly lipsync the lines to before having watched.
And they’re banking on the fact that audiences’ voracious hunger for nostalgia — and yearning for that specific, ineffable feeling of happiness they experienced in a cellphone-free ’90s movie theatre — will make them interpret releasing “While You Were Sleeping but slightly worse” for the 10th time as somehow a win.
That doesn’t mean romantic comedies — that is, comedies based in romance — shouldn’t exist. We’re barely a year out from genre deconstruction Anora winning best picture for challenging what a rom-com could even be. And we’re just weeks past Zendaya and Robert Pattinson’s squirm-inducing The Drama challenging how far you can stretch the concept of comedy before it turns into pain.
But even assuming a rom-com needs to be lighthearted, there are new entries that feel they’re attempting to do more than simply reflect the past back at us unaltered. Richard Linklater’s Hit Man filtered its steamy relationship through a social media-obsessed worldview — and jokes that didn’t feel lifted from a Tyler Perry Mad Lib.
Canadian rom-com Young Werther updated an 18th-century story for a hustle culture and image obsessed generation. And Palm Springs managed to fit Groundhog Day into the shape of a technicolour modern fairytale, riffing on both the pointlessness of monogamy and the value of finding a partner in an otherwise pointless world.
Basically, those movies feel like they were designed to be fleshed-out stories first, with the genre arrived at after. That’s unlike Tuscany, a market satisfaction project that appears to purposefully avoid any mention or even inference of its one original aspect: that of Black leads, in Europe, seeking to find love.
Which is especially a shame, as it is otherwise serviceable in its jokes, packaging and pacing. But born as it is of an impossible desire to re-release the ’90s today, it still makes the case that this specific, restrictive style of rom-com does not necessarily need to exist.
Because regardless of how satisfying, escapist and relaxing those movies were, simply trying to recreate them exactly is an exercise in diminishing returns. Claiming a genre can only exist so long as it stays the same will turn it into an artistic void, and defining rom-coms by their ability to pretend they are something far and forever in the past will mean that accomplishing their goals will inherently make them campy, contrived and predictable.
That is, other than Tuscany‘s blooper reel in the credits. We should absolutely bring those back.
