Product: Under the Tuscan Sun (2003)
Rating: 3.0
I laughed until I cried.
Ghastly chick flic riddled with clichés. Like Oscar Wilde's comment about Dickens, "One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing." The endless assault to the senses of repetitive themes of a woman scorned and a new life blossoming kept me between the Scylla and Charybdis of vomiting and hysterics. When we watched it, my wife repeatedly hit me over the head with her "Elle" magazine.Yet, this film has broad appeal for those middle aged men like me who've loved Diane Lane since "A Little Romance," and like the outdoors and travel. The shots of Tuscany and the coast are beautiful, and the house around which most of the action takes place is gorgeous, and so of those chick flics for which we occasionally are obliged to sit through with our amante, this one is the least offensive.The first cliché: Frances Mayes (Diane Lane) has a perfect balanced life, with a wonderful happy home, all suddenly shattered by that snake-in-the-pants husband. Of course, the divorce settlement is all in *his* favor ("isn't that always the way, girl!?").Next cliché: a gaggle of sympathetic but ultimately feckless friends with shadows of divided loyalties. Of course, the most sympathetic one is gay (you go, girlfriend!).I won't belabor the "change of scene" cliché, since, like "The Simpson's" Millhouse, by this time I wanted to scream "when are we going to get to the fireworks factory?" off to Tuscany: on a crummy bus!Next, an impulsive irrational decision (you go girl!) to buy a ruin of a house, not possibly made from a hormone imbalance or deeply unresolved issues without adequate coping mechanisms. No. This is feminine intuition at work. (Girl power!)In the town nearby, Frances meets Katherine (Lindsay Duncan), a `free spirited" English woman (or mad lithium deprived manic depressive?) in her early 60s, who has erected her life as a cartoon of herself in devotion to an encounter in her youth with Fellini. It isn't tragic that she's done nothing with her life after building it on the shallow sands of glance with pseudo-intellectual "greatness," it is s*i*g*n*i*f*i*c*a*n*t. Most of her dialogue consists of Katherine tediously lecturing Frances about sex, of which Frances improbably manages to get plenty of boy-toy supply, albeit short-lived ("snake in the pants men again! Boooo Hisssssss!"). One wonders why director Audrey Wells didn't cast the corpse of Ruth Gordon in this part. For the rest of the film I kept looking around for Bud Cort to drive up to the house in his hearse Jaguar to conclude the subplot by giving Katherine a good "free spirited" rogering and a happily ever after.Then there is the ironic cupid cliché: Frances's own love life (for which the house serves as metaphor) is being reconstructed from a ruin, yet she must play both Cupid and Hera to a younger couple. Yet the voice of Zelda comes in here too, "Rich girls don't marry poor boys" and Juliet is the daughter of forbidding Italian papa, and Romeo is a Polish blue collar dolt without family or purse.Did we keep getting beaten over the head with how important "family" is in the new place Frances has impulsively settled? We all know single-women without family end up mad (like Katherine). Angry, Juno (Frances) seeks a magic flower that is suppose to allow fertilization without a man (or embarks on a series of disastrous affairs). Finding the rare flower (her home, Bramasole) Juno (Frances) uses it to become pregnant and gives birth to Mars (additional subplot conflicts, including her own).And so, "Family" finally does resolves the plot, and Frances (Juno) hosts the wedding of our young lovers at her now restored home (Olympus). Our hero enters stage left (right). He has come from afar to pay homage (worship) the fair Frances ("I heard the great writer I admire...."), whom he has venerated from afar at strange temples (grad school).And here is our ending: The cast aside Juno has been through hell, is given new transformation as Proserpina, and at the shadow of her lover rises from the flower'd bower and becomes Venus once again, beautiful, loved, and admired for her mind and body and soul. The curtain falls, and the perfect female illusion of a perfect man without flaws living together in a golden flower strewn paradise of long mornings and playful equality (no, not really equal, he worships her *intellectual* superiority), is once again given arc and confirmation.The end.My wife was crying and I giggled myself to sleep.