Contrary to positive advance buzz for “You, Me & Tuscany,” the romcom is not back.

In a film where director Kat Coiro frames everyone and everything in Tuscany with genuine warmth and affection, she cannot seem to portray the film’s protagonist in the same way, and therefore justify why the audience should want such an insufferable character to end up there and experience the beauty of Italy with us. 

In doing so, the film attempts to force age-old tropes — a heroine torn between a suave but slimy man and his down-to-earth brother, familial deception and misunderstandings galore — down our throats in the most unconvincing ways.

The film stars Halle Bailey as Brianna (“Anna”), a culinary school dropout and professional house-sitter whose career comes to an abrupt end when her employer discovers Anna parading her clothes around in public.

Freshly unemployed, Anna has a meet-cute with Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor), an Italian man, at a hotel bar, where they talk about his falling out with his father and her unfulfilled dream of traveling to Italy with her late mother. The two bond over their shared appreciation for the beauty of Matteo’s house, Casa Luna, which he fled to following his familial dispute. 

Empowered by Matteo’s entrepreneurial optimism and laissez-faire attitude, Anna books a one-way flight to Italy with $535 in savings, no plans and zero reservations — hotel or moral. 

Once in Tuscany, she is annoyed to discover that none of the local hotels have vacancies due to the popularity of the yearly medieval festival. With night fast approaching, Anna decides to squat at Casa Luna, where she sifts through Matteo’s belongings and tries on an engagement ring sitting in his drawer. 

When Matteo’s mother (Isabella Ferrari) and grandmother (Stefania Casini) show up to clean the house, she is inadvertently mistaken for his fiancée, but decides to play along to ensure accommodation. But alas! While masquerading as Matteo’s fiancée, she falls for his adopted brother, Michael (Regé-Jean Page).

When Matteo eventually arrives and confronts Anna about her breaking into his property, as well as lying to his family, she chastises his audacity to be upset.

And this is the woman we are asked to root for for almost two hours. 

To be fair, the scenery is lovely, having been filmed on location in Tuscany, and the supporting cast — particularly Matteo’s deliciously complicated but well-meaning family — go above and beyond the mediocre material that consistently undercuts them.

But “You, Me & Tuscany” has a fatal Anna problem, and no amount of vista-induced wanderlust can fix it. 

Anna’s behavior is consistently excused for convenience rather than examined for depth. Her backstory — including the death of her mother — allows her to treat her grief as a get-out-of-jail-free card for everything that follows.

Her leading man, Michael, is also dealing with similar issues of parental loss. However, the stony register he maintains throughout the film is unable to reconcile these two parallel journeys to elicit a substantial subplot. While trying to convey restraint for his presumed future sister-in-law, Page instead communicates distance and boredom. 

We are told that Michael and Anna are falling in love through a series of lingering glances and one scene in which they get drunk together. It’s unfortunate, therefore, that two genuinely talented performers could not muster the chemistry to heat their lukewarm on-screen sequences.

Structurally, the film owes a significant debt to “While You Were Sleeping” (1995) — fake engagement, absent fake-betrothed, lonely woman and her new family, finding true love with her fake fiancé’s brother, while said fiancé turns out to be a terrible person. 

The difference is that Sandra Bullock’s character, Lucy, wanted to come clean from the start and was, crucially, likeable. Bumbling. Sympathetic. Self-deprecating and kind to a fault. It’s easy to understand why everyone loved her. 

Anna, in contrast, demands ridiculous amounts of leniency from everyone she meets, and yet they all love her anyway — Matteo even makes a point to say that everyone takes to Anna “so quickly” — because the script requires it.

There is a genuinely interesting film buried somewhere in this premise — a Black American woman navigating a foreign country predominantly dominated by white people, negotiating cultural expectations, language barriers and processing grief through food and found family.

Sadly, while the film acknowledges this possibility with throwaway lines from her friend about not returning to America in a body bag, it almost immediately pivots, favoring superficial plot contrivances and gags like mistaking Italian vocabulary for vulgar English words. 

“You, Me & Tuscany” is not funny enough to be a comedy, not passionately swoony enough to be a romance and not self-aware enough to be satire. The film can’t commit to or succeed in any avenue, and ultimately accomplishes nothing on all fronts.