Longing For The Tuscan Sun

After lending my Under The Tuscan Sun DVD to a friend for months, I finally got it back over the weekend. And just out of a whim, I decided to watch it again last night. For obviously clear reasons, I simply love the movie for the plain feel-good theme. Generally I am not a sucker for romantic movies but I do like the genre. I am just not for the whole nauseating over-the-top Titanic kind of romance which just leaves you wishing both the protagonists would shut up and die horribly. Under The Tuscan Sun, though having a predictable happy ending was more about letting go and taking life by the horns.

Very loosely based on the memoirs of Frances Mayes, the movie puts the author in a fictional setting as a depressed, recently divorced writer, Frances (Diane Lane) who is sent on a gay tour of Italy by her lesbian friend, Patti (Sandra Oh). Out of an impulse, she purchases a dilapidated villa in Tuscany and finds a new life in her new home. The best part of the movie has to be how they played around with how in one of her depressed state, Frances expresses her doubts in ever having a family to fill the home she just bought and that she wanted there to be a wedding. In the end, she gets her wish, though not in exactly the way she expected. Lindsay Duncan as the eccentric advice dispensing English expatriate, Katherine was a joy to watch.

The movie was also partly the reason why I am saving up so I could take a trip to Italy one day. Not so much as hoping that I can experience the same thing in the movie (what am I going to purchase a villa in Tuscany with?), but more to just see the same sights. As Sandra Oh's character said, "How can you say no to Italy?". Would be fun though if you can buy a nice little villa in some rural part of Italy and live a life without worry. Just take a look at the picture on the left. What I would do to wake up to a scene like this every morning rather than rows and rows of generic sterile flats and terrace houses on stripped earth and screwed up LDP traffic.