In the long tradition of films about the dueling of a loved one,
A Villa in Tuscany, the
debut of British actor James D'Arcy, adds hardly anything.
In any case, something morbid due to the link to a similar misfortune of its two main interpreters, Liam Neeson and his son Micheál Richardson.
Something that is not enough to sustain such a predictable and maudlin film.
On screen, Neeson and Richardson play a painter and his gallery owner son on a trip to Italy to sell their abandoned family home.
There, in a postcard place, they will meet again with the ghosts of the death of the young man's mother, who died in a car accident when he was a child.
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Liam Neeson, the widower who has paid tribute to his wife in every movie for 13 years
Richardson brings freshness and is the best of the film.
Son of the Irish interpreter and the ill-fated actress Natasha Richardson - from whom he has taken his illustrious surname;
her maternal grandparents are Tony Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave — it's hard not to see in this film the shadow of her own family tragedy, which occurred in 2009, when her mother died in a skiing accident in Canada.
If there is any glimmer of truth in this story, it comes from the sequences in which the father-son catharsis emerges and the duel that both characters have been dragging for years takes center stage.
For the rest,
A Villa in Tuscany
is a digestible film, with sunny views, capable of combining a good number of topics about a conflictive parental-filial relationship, with one of those houses in ruins perfect to shine again with a little hand of paint. and on the places and objects that resist being buried.
Also about pasta, tomatoes, cars and that bohemian and idyllic life that always goes hand in hand with the cliché of Tuscany.
A VILLA IN TUSCANY
Directed by: James D'Arcy
Cast: Liam Neeson, Micheál Richardson, Valeria Bilello, Lindsay Duncan, Gian Marco Tavani, Marco Quaglia, Helena Antonio.
Genre: drama.
United Kingdom, 2020.
Duration: 94 minutes.