Even though the new Netflix rom-com “La Dolce Villa” is infinitely better than my worst nightmarish film, “Mother of the Bride,” which was Mark Waters’ last directorial work for Netflix, “La Dolce Villa” was still very boring for me, and would have made me feel something even had it been a disaster of a film.
Scott Foley portrays Eric, a miserable widower in his mid-fifties, who finds himself back in Italy, a country he calls cursed, which in turn makes everything about the country uncomfortable for him. He is looking for Li, his daughter, who aims to inherit a villa. Under a new scheme to bolster the economy, towns are willing to sell off exceptionally old heritage villas for a single Euro. This scheme is combined with another economic plan that hopes to boost the population in rural towns and towns like Montezara. Once he arrives in the village of Montezara, he meets the town’s Mayor, Francesca (Violante Placido), and together they plan to convert the villa into a cooking school for tourists, which would be even more beneficial for the town’s economy.
The film was clearly inspired by the far better Diane Lane film “Under The Tuscan Sun,” in where a divorced writer unexpectedly goes to Italy, purchases an extravagant villa, then goes along to live an incredible life full of endless possibilities.
Plot points and even the score have been lifted from the prior movie. Unlike the film, “Under The Tuscan Sun”, written and directed by Audrey Wells and based on the best selling memoir by Frances Mayes, took relish to trivial aspects of life which made up a community like olives and the grime of restoring a space. Moreover, it also featured the amazing Diane Lane coming right off her best actress nominated role in “Unfaithful.”
Every script decision and directorial choose made in La Dolce Villa, from the everything being casted to the implants shallow characterizations and overly clean production design, comes across as vivid back drop noise. There is no vividness for what reality in the village is like, for newcomers or people who have resided there their entire lives. Most of the people appear to be simply a shell, be they lead or supporting characters, so that they can spew out content and give unnecessary exposition or, worse, be cliches.
Liv performed various odd jobs throughout Italy after college, from nannying to teaching English, in an effort to reconnect with her mother’s Italian roots.
It is my understanding that it is unclear what exactly she studied in college or what her career aspirations are aside from moving to Italy and that she feels positively about her life in Italy. At some point, she does become friends with the contractor who is working on renovating the villa, who seems to think that she has some potential as an interior designer – probably because she knows how to use the word “vibe” and purchase traditional paint colors. He then sets her up with an internship with a friend of his in Rome. All of Liv’s character development, whether from transforming the villa, her on-and-off love story with a local chef, Giovanni (Giuseppe Futia), or her sudden internship, is completely disjointed and unintegrated in the movie, with Liv absent for such extended periods of time that her reappearance is near shocking. She also seems to be in the film too much, so her scenes are largely curt and superficial to facilitate more screen time for the melting relationship between Eric and Francesca, which in its own right suffers from overconcentration on plot devices and lacks any real intensity.
Francesca introduces Eric to the Italian phrase ‘Dolce far niente’, meaning sweet doing nothing, which encourages one to unwind and relish in being unproductive. Although both of them, do agree to chuckle at the phrase because as workaholics, they know it’s folks such as them who are always keeping the world afloat.
The script looks as though it is trying to set up both characters to eventually learn to embrace this ethos. However, even though they go through one ludicrous situation after another, there still seems to be a running theme towards achieving business capitalistic targets whether it be the cooking school housed in a former villa or the town.
All the film’s fabricated scheming would perhaps be excused if the film actually bothered to depict Italy in a different light. Although Waters did film on location in Italy, he films an overwhelming number of scenes in and around Tuscany and eastern Lazio as if they are set-ups for postcards-staged but lifeless and stripped of the wild sensuality of existence. The countryside is filmed with a really harsh bright sunlight that somehow flattens and washes out the beauty of the region. Giving us cardboard characters in a cardboard land.
In the end, “La Dolce Villa” is probably as authentic an Italian experience as you would get from spending a night at the Olive Garden.
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