Under The Tuscan Sun

By John Anderson | Staff Writer

10:46 AM EDT, September 25, 2003

(PG-13) After a nasty divorce, an American writer moves to Tuscany, buys a house and proceeds to allow the light, landscape and olive oil to work their magic. A tad icky, but Diane Lane makes it worthwhile. With Sandra Oh, Lindsay Duncan, Pawel Szajda, Vincent Riotta, Giulia Steigerwalt, Raoul Bova. Directed by Audrey Wells. Screenplay by Wells, based on the book by Frances Mayes. 1:40 (adult situations, vulgarity). At area theaters.

Women -- women who watch movies, at any rate -- know that a troubled, unsettled or nonexistent love life can be remedied by just one thing: A trip to the Mediterranean. The precedents were set long ago: "Summertime," "Roman Holiday," "Shirley Valentine," "Only You," "Enchanted April" -- all you really need are some beautiful landscapes, sumptuous food and/or a few half-bearded men to make life worth living again.

That there has been, over the years, such a large catalog of soon-to-be-unsolitary movie women traveling the interiors of fictional Italy and Greece makes it difficult to take "Under the Tuscan Sun" with the seriousness it might deserve. Based on the popular nonfiction book by Frances Mayes (which has been rendered, shall we say, "user- friendly" by screenwriter Audrey Wells), the romantic comedy stars Diane Lane as the author, a professor of literature in San Francisco engaged in a nasty divorce. Her unseen ex is asking for alimony, but she may, she is told, sell him their beautiful house, which will net her a pile of money. It also will allow her -- after her pregnant lesbian friend, Patti (Sandra Oh), gives her a plane ticket to Italy (fans of the book are by now shaking their heads in wonderment) -- to buy a lovely if dilapidated 300-year-old Tuscan villa.

You needn't be a fan of the genre, if indeed this is a genre, to know exactly what's coming -- from the moment a cocktail party guest tells her how lucky her husband is for having a "literary wife who makes brownies" (while the bubbly piano takes on the air of a dirge) to the moment she says no to the air ticket (she will say yes) to the moment she says no to the villa (she will buy it) to the way Lane looks -- frumpily dressed, shadows haunting her face, her hair yanked into an accident of a ponytail. Somehow, you know something's going to happen to make her look like Diane Lane. It does, she does and between all the shots of flower-strewn valleys, epic architecture and golden sunlight, what "Under the Tuscan Sun" does is make you want to go to Italy -- it's eye candy, for subscribers to Gourmet magazine. What Lane makes you do is wonder why she hasn't been making more movies over the years. Having turned Adrian Lyne's otherwise calamitous "Unfaithful" into something watchable last year, she brings to the Frances character some of the same knowing-but-self-conscious sexuality she employed in that film. Frances is beautiful, worn down, but never a victim -- she has a sense of her own absurdity, a sense that her place in the world has been pulled out from under her, through no fault of her own (which makes it all the worse). Lane, who blossoms spectacularly over the course of the movie, always plays down her looks, which is a bit like Tiger Woods playing miniature golf.

"Under the Tuscan Sun" has several outstanding performances -- by Vincent Riotta, for instance, who plays the married real-estate agent who gently strangles his romantic impulses for Frances, to Lindsay Duncan, whose loony local, Katherine, wears big hats, swims in the local fountain (a la Anita Ekberg) and does nothing to fight the reputation for English eccentricity. The young-lover subplot -- Italian girl (Giulia Steigerwalt) and Polish laborer (Pawel Szajda) -- is like overcooked pasta, a little gummy. But the film belongs to Lane, even as the spirits of Audrey Hepburn, Katharine Hepburn and Federico Fellini fly in formation above it.