Love in the Villa is so forgettable that it ceases to exist

With the maddeningly mediocre Love in the Villa, Netflix continues to flog the dead elephant in the room – which, in this case, is the Hallmark-style Hollywood romantic comedy. Who’s going to tell them? And who’s going to rescue Europe from the clutches of starry-eyed American tourists? The problem with these movies is that they aren’t even self-aware or sardonic. They actually strive to be unoriginal and, what’s the term, ‘snackable’. They feature performances that strive to be generic and forgettable. They aspire to look like tourism adverts that just happen to be longer than normal. They actually play out like simplistic and cloying live-action versions of Disney cartoons that don’t exist.

Note the title: Love in the Villa. Note the premise: An incorrigible ‘Romeo and Juliet’ fan named (of course) Julie is dumped on the eve of her dream vacation to distant Verona only for her to go solo, find a double-booked villa and fall for the pesky but impossibly good-looking British man sharing that villa. Note the tropes: The two start out as bickering Tom-and-Jerry rivals before warming up to each other; there’s a wine-making farm detour; there’s a fountain; the soundtrack features Italian versions of English pop classics; the two snobbish significant others show up to win them back; all the Italians in the film are made to sound like simpletons because their English is weak. It’s a tale older than Shakespeare, designed to capture the imagination of Mills-and-Boons-loving pre-teens from 1992 who grow up to defend Serendipity over Notting Hill.

For a hot minute, I thought of the Hindi film Queen, which starred Kangana Ranaut back in 2015, and told a far more progressive story about a woman finding herself after going on a solo honeymoon to Paris and Amsterdam. Evidently, writer-director Mark Steven Johnson is not a fan of single people or individualism. When Julie gets dumped in the beginning, I expected her to discover that romance is a tourist trap in the ultimate city of love, Verona. Now that’s subversion. But no, Julie is missing an alphabet, so the only subversion is that she finds a super-fit man who cooks for her. Love defines her. We have no idea who she is otherwise. In fact, she has no right to exist otherwise.

The initial parts – where both of them try to get rid of each other by playing juvenile tricks – are difficult to watch; even the actors (Kat Graham and Tom Hopper) look uncomfortable. The things they do, too, would be despicable in any other universe. Julie turns Charlie (that’s his name, by the way) into catnip while he’s sleeping. Charlie slaps pages of Julie’s personal diary on Juliet’s wall below the famous balcony. He sends back her luggage from the airline and convinces them to sell her clothes to orphans, which in turn lets Julie dress like an Italian model for the rest of the film. He also feeds her horse meat, and she gets him arrested, which almost ruins his career. These aren’t funny gags. In fact, they’re not even gags. They’re the actions of two budding sociopaths.

It may sound cutesy, but this is not a children’s film. The timing and tone are off. There’s no wit, and the playfulness looks artificial. The statues in Verona have more chemistry with the bees than the two leads have with each other. The cobblestones have more personality than the characters. When both their ex-partners show up, they behave so poorly that it reflects on Julie and Charlie for even being with them in the first place. I get that levity is a thing in modern-day romances, so much so that even critics have started to welcome the return of dumb and affable love stories under the guise of nostalgia. But Love in the Villa is so light that it disappears into thin air. The last straw comes when Julie flies to Italy in an airline called Amore. Unfortunately, this is six minutes into the two-hour-long film.

Rahul Desai is a film critic and programmer, who spends his spare time travelling to all the places from the movies he writes about.

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