Warning: Some of the things in this unlikely analysis of the movie Under the Tuscan Sun will give away certain small elements of the film which may have surprised you if you hadn't read this article first. Its tone may also make some people angry. I don't know why that is.
Full disclosure: I am not a movie critic. Still, I was curious enough to wonder what spin Touchstone Pictures (part of Disney Enterprises) was going to give the tourist promised land called Tuscany. Then I saw Under the Tuscan Sun and got a clue. Several actually.
Clue: An old Italian woman selling her broken-down hovel waits for a sign from God before selling it to the whiny American without a clue. The sign is--are you ready for this?--Pigeon Poop! That's right, God's favorite pigeon has been hiding out in the rafters of this pile of stones for years, just waiting for the chance to pummel Diane Lane's purty little noggin.
Clue Two: During a Tuscan thunderstorm, a bolt of lightning hits an abandoned washing machine. Tickled somewhat pink, said washer suddenly decides to jump 12 feet into the air and manages a backflip down a slope to the garden below. (Tuscany gives great thunderstorms. I love them.
Clue Three: The main character serves a dinner which includes fried zucchini flowers. It is winter. (It's true that in the US we can get all manner of badly engineered and mediocre tasting vegetables at any time of the year, but hey, the good people of Tuscany hold tightly to the quaint old notion of eating good things when they're at the peak of ripeness. It's who they are. It's the "old" in Old Europe that some of us find entrancingly honest and, yeah, it's the same "Old Europe" cranky politicians use as invective against people who refuse the notion of letting mad scientists genetically modify what nature always does better.)
Clue Four: A Polish laborer in a Tuscan flag-throwing demonstration bonks himself on the head with the heavy flagpole and goes down hard. The townspeople never leave the sidewalk! (We're not in Italy any more Dorothy!
Unrequited love, the modern elixir...
Unlike the book, the main character in the movie Under the Tuscan Sun is coming off a messy divorce. She looks for and never really finds love among men she meets. Why is it that every modern drama (or comedy for that matter) has to have a "healthy" dose of tension in the form of a love that never, ever blossoms? What does this tell about us as a society? Do we harken back to the age of the troubadours with their long-distance love and incessant pining? Get out your lute!
Ok, enough silliness. On to the actors: Diane Lane's performance was pretty good for a woman forced to play a writer who actually expects the Italian guy she beds one day on a whim to stay chaste until she sees him again two months later.
Sandra Oh was absolutely superb as the "pregnant dyke." I'd pay good money to see anything she's in--except...Under a Tuscan Sun.
Raoul Bova plays an almost believable Italian lover, one of the few male cast members who actually seemed Italian. The rest were walking cliches.
There wasn't a whole lot of Sun in "Under the Tuscan Sun." Not for me anyway.
