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DVD Under the Tuscan Sun (Full Screen Edition)
Though she made her first movie at the age of 13, Diane Lane has only blossomed into a true star in her 30s, and Under the Tuscan Sun marks her full flowering. After a brutal divorce, Frances (Lane, Unfaithful, A Walk on the Moon) is persuaded by her friend Patti (Sandra Oh) to take a tour of Italy--where, on a whim that she hopes will rescue her from her desperate unhappiness, she buys a rundown villa and sets out to renovate it. Along the way, she gets advice from a former Fellini actress, meets a scrumptious Italian lover, and helps support Patti after her own relationship derails. The conclusion of Under the Tuscan Sun holds no surprises, but the deft turns and observations along the way are delightful. Lane carries the film effortlessly but surely, exuding both heartbreak and re-awakening passion. --Bret Fetzer
Review(s): DVD Under the Tuscan Sun (Full Screen Edition)
Under the Tuscan Weather...
When a San Francisco writer's marriage ends abruptly, writers block steps in. To clear her mind, she tours Tuscany. Playing her urges, she purchases a crumbling villa and assembles a crew of immigrants to repair the house. Then she spends time restoring her friendships repairing her ability to love and enjoying the Tuscan sun.
This film is blessed with the beautiful scenery of Tuscany. From the beautiful vistas, to the colorful seaside to the richly cultured towns, we are treated to something special. Additionally, the beautiful and talented Oscar Nominee Diane Lane adds to the esthetic value of the film.
Unfortunately, that is the end of the positive notice for this story. Start with the screenplay that is thrown together from clichés from hundreds of much better mediocre films, add in a community theatre caliber performance by Sandra oh, usually a good actress, and put it all in front of a camera with no apparent director.
The autobiographical screenplay is by Audrey Welles, the writer of GEORGE OF THE JUNGLE! That's a stretch for ya.
The story pushes and pushes for a payoff definitely not worth the hour and 45 minutes.
The DVD has a great video transfer and the audio transfer is acceptable, nicely presenting the sweet musical score.
Tu mi fai squagliare come neve al sole - You make me melt like snow under the sun
The exhilaration of the Tuscany landscape just compells you to say Il tuo sorriso e' il sole della mia vita (Your smile is the sunshine of my life) .. Diane Lane gives a deeply endearing and enrapturing performance as a heartbroken writer remaking her life and a villa in Italy. Based on the literary travel memoirs of San Francisco journalist Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun is a testament to one of the most lion-hearted things the human heart can do - have the courage to love again despite the scars of betrayal, abandonment, and traumatic sorrow. In the blink of an eye Frances Mayes' world is turned upside-down when a seemingly happy marriage ends in divorce. Life as she knows it is in tatters and Frances switches scenery to recover from a shattering experience. From the salt air of San Francisco to the kiss of the Tuscan sun rays does Frances slowly recuperate the fragments of her heart and a villa in need of some repair. On the way she re-experiences the magic and miracle of romance, a new love, and a life in Italy that she never imagined. If ever there is a doubt whether Italian (instead of French) is the language of love ... Under the Tuscan Sun settles the debate once and for all.
If this book inspires your own trip to Italy, the following phrases will come in handy though they may not be in your travel phrase book: **WARNING - BEWARE of #12**
1)Your eyes are like two stars in the night / I tuoi occhi sono come due stelle nella notte
2)Your smile is the sunshine of my life / Il tuo sorriso e' il sole della mia vita
3)Your lips are as sweet as honey / Le tue labbra sono dolci come il miele
4)Your skin is like silk / La tua pelle e' come seta
5)You are always in my heart / Tu sei sempre nel mio cuore
6)My life without you is like day without sun / La mia vita senza te e' come il giorno senza il sole
7)My love for you is deeper than the ocean / Il mio amore per te e' piu' profondo dell'oceano
8)Everytime I kiss you I forget where I am / Ogni volta che ti bacio dimentico dove sono
9)You make me melt like snow under the sun / Tu mi fai squagliare come neve al sole
10)Come here and kiss me / Vieni qui e baciami
11) I would like to spend all my life with you / Vorrei trascorrere tutta la mia vita con te
12)Would you marry me? / Mi vuoi sposare/
13)You are very beautiful / Tu sei bellissima
14)You are my angel / Tu sei il mio angelo
15)Forvige me my love / Perdonami amore mio
16)It's all my fault / E' solo colpa mia
17)Would you have dinner with me? / Vuoi cenare con me?
18)Our love is forever / Il nostro amore e'eterno
19)I only have eyes for you / Io ho occhi solo per te
20)Ti amo / I love you
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.
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