Don’t judge La Dolce Villa (now on Netflix) for the pun. Actually, maybe you should. It’s a pretty lousy pun. And it sure seems to be drawing a parallel between itself and Fellini, which is a tad presumptuous, considering it’s a rom-com with all the heft of a sheet of tissue paper on the Moon. So, on second thought, judge away as I get to the nut-graf stuff of the movie, which stars Scandal and Felicity guy Scott Foley as the world’s worst dad, Pretty Little Liars star Maia Reficco as the daughter who should sock him one and The American star Violante Placido as his love interest – all of whom work to make the movie memorable, but alas, to little avail.
The Gist: Eric Field (Foley) leaves a good first impression on us: Even though he’s running late for his train, he stops to help a woman haul a baby stroller up a staircase. The rest of the movie is tough sledding for him, though, since he’s in Italy, attempting to stop his adult daughter from living an interesting life. More specifically, Olivia (Reficco) wants to take advantage of an incentive to lure young ambitious people to the small town of Mantezara by selling them one-Euro fixer-upper properties. I mean, this isn’t how he raised her! He raised her to be boring and responsible! Not to make a potentially lucrative real estate investment! She’s being such a moron! I mean, take him for an example – he gave up being a chef to be a restaurant-biz consultant! People who know how to truly live know they have to ditch all their creative endeavors to sit at a desk!
Sorry. I just really don’t like this guy. He comes off all genial and smiley and tall and salt-and-pepper handsome, but I’m convinced that inside, he’s all coal-black biliousness. He gets worse, but let me get to that plot point in a linear fashion first: Eric meets up with Olivia as she’s about to eyeball potential villas for purchase. The local mayor, Francesca (Placido), spearheads the one-Euro program, and acts as real estate agent. At this point, one should note that Eric and Francesca are of similar age and single and rather well put-together physically. The laws of attraction WILL NOT BE IGNORED. Anyway, the three of them tour one dilapidated money pit after another, Eric being skeptical and critical, and Olivia being optimistic and hopeful. Neither seems particularly realistically reasonable, but if you’re not siding with Olivia, you should go stand in the corner with Eric and all the other Negative Nellies and wonder why you need to piss all over peoples’ picnics.
Olivia settles on a villa with oodles of charm and character beneath its dusty, crusty exterior, which means it’s the opposite of her dad RIMSHOT. Because this movie doesn’t give two flying farts about consistency of character, Eric decides to indefinitely neglect all his boring consultant duties back home and help her out, first by loaning her some cash, and then by trying to take over the renovations. What. A Dick. You just want to bash him over the head with his gigantic sense of entitlement. He is subject to a bit of humiliation when he tries to ride an old rusty bicycle into town and realizes it doesn’t have brakes, but he deserves far, far worse, trust me.
But before we wish for Eric to break his neck and be taken out of this plot by ambulance, I have to be fair and reveal that the movie’s sort of about his renovation as a person, too, almost, maybe, sort of, a little bit. He finds himself spending quality time with Ms. Mayor – woo woo hubba hubba – and hanging out at the local trattoria, where the chef inspires him to start cheffing again. The three old ladies who hang out in the town square – they’re all named Antonia; please laugh – go from despising this intrusive foreigner to liking him. And he actually pitches a good idea to Olivia, and they decide to build a big-ass kitchen in the villa and turn it into a cooking school. So maybe he’s not so bad after all?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Isn’t this just a more dimbulbed version of Under the Tuscan Sun?
Performance Worth Watching: At least Placido has a likable character to work with here, whereas Foley grits-and-bears it and Reficco tries to keep her borderline-nonexistent character from wafting away in the breeze.
Memorable Dialogue: Ugh:
Antonia No. 1: We want to be “grandfluencers”!
Antonia No. 3: On the TikTok!
Eric: Hashtag goals, right?
Sex and Skin: Nah.
Our Take: Dialogue. It’s a major issue in La Dolce Villa. Case in point: “Hey, there’s a philosophy of life I read about. What do you feel when you look at the ocean?” and “Mom was always the glue. Our go-between. And then she was gone. So we got… glueless.” (I’ll save you from Eric’s poignant anecdote about raisins.) And yet, it gets worse: “Nothing good on Netflix tonight?” a character utters, blissfully unaware that they exist in a Netflix movie that’s so empty-headed, shoddy and forgettable, it might be among the Netflixiest. The review writes itself from here, although I absolutely need to ask, anyone know what rhymes with “glueless”?
My ability to extract a throughline from this movie – Eric’s transformation from major asshat to nice-enough guy in 90-odd minutes – took significant work. The film, from Mean Girls and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past director Mark Waters, is so lightweight that finding intent is like chasing a pigeon feather in a hurricane. The characters flit about for 70-odd minutes, participating in random banal encounters and making a series of giant professional and life decisions on whims, before the plot bends over backward to introduce a conflict (via the local giver-outer-of-building-permits, who also has a thing for Francesca) that’s solved not due to the intelligence of its characters, but luck-via-contrivance-of-script. Meanwhile, we get flimsy noodle-armed comedy, multiple instances of rom-com Interrupted Kisses and a marked dearth of chemistry between Placido and Foley. There’s value in unchallenging escapism, but La Dolce Villa is so insubstantial, it all but evaporates in front of our eyes.
Our Call: I watched La Dolce Villa and then, just like that, poof, it was gone. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
