Product: Under the Tuscan Sun (2003)
Rating: 2.0
Disinter and Clone Bette Davis If This Is What Chick Flix Have Come To
I am the ideal demographic for a chick flick. "Under the Tuscan Sun" is an insult to the international sisterhood of chick flick fans.The only way the filmmakers could have made this movie more stupid, more saccharine, more pandering to the lowest common denominator, is if they including a heartwarming, tearjerking, "Terms of Endearment" style death by beautiful movie disease.The Studly Hunk who falls into the Over-Forty Heroine's lap is just so ... airbrushed into unreality. How could anyone be turned on by a man who bears no relation to reality? Don't answer that. I don't want to know. Anyway, this is supposed to be a chick flick, not Sci Fi.The lead is a woman wounded by her ex-husband, lost chances, and the spectre of a wintry future. Diane Lane has a body a 20 year old would envy. She lacks gravitas. I couldn't feel for her plight. It's just not there on the ravaged face, the drooping body; she's too aerobicized and perky."Tuscan Sun" is as cluttered with gizmos girls are supposed to gush over as a Barbie doll house. There are swooning, adorable Polaks, goofy young lovers, a pregnant lesbian best friend.There are close-ups of yummy Italian food and unbelievably adorable people having big dinner parties. Everyone is adorable. Even grandma, with her internet love affair with a minor. It's so cute you really wish that at least one of the characters were serial killer.Everyone has tons of money and can fly between San Francisco to Italy without a moment's care. Frances, the lead character, lives a life completely divorced from normal monetary concerns. This sounds like a fantasy but it comes across as creepy. "Does this woman ever work? Does money mean anything to her?" These questions become so annoying, and distasteful, that you are taken out of the movie.For a movie that got similar themes very right, check out David Lean's 1955 "Summertime," starring Katharine Hepburn and Rosano Brazzi. You love their onscreen romance, but you see that she is imperfect, and he is, too. "Summertime" is just as visually beautiful as "Tuscan Sun," but it provides an artistic experience that "Tuscan Sun" can't even aspire to.I didn't much like this movie but I did like the actor playing Martini, the realtor who helped Diane Lane with so many things, including -- paging Dr. Freud -- a snake she could not find in her bedroom.There was a real chemistry between the two. He wasn't the most handsome man in the movie, or the most sexually dynamic, but he was the one, I think, that most viewers probably wanted to see her end up with.He was married. But this is a movie. You have two characters with such great chemistry; you could make his wife a harridan, or a lesbian -- not enough Italian lesbian movie characters out there -- or maybe she received a vocation from God and entered a convent. One that doesn't allow husbands.