HEART OF THE COUNTRY.(Under the Tuscan Sun)(To Be and to Have)(Anything Else)(Movie Review)

"Under the Tuscan Sun" might be called a soft-core renovation fantasy for educated women. Frances (Diane Lane), a San Francisco writer and professor who has been dumped by her adulterous husband, goes on a bus tour of Tuscany and buys a crumbling villa there. Many blissfully undramatic rehab adventures follow--an old wall falls down, a toilet mysteriously emits boiling water--before the house gets scraped, plastered, painted, and gardened back into shape. But it's Frances's life, of course, that really needs work. The writer-director Audrey Wells ("Guinevere") has taken Frances Mayes's matter-of-fact memoir of restoring a summer residence with her husband and turned it into an emotional tale of a single woman's search for fulfillment--a vehicle for the freshly minted thirty-eight-year-old star Diane Lane, who was so ravenously hungry in Adrian Lyne's 2002 adultery drama, "Unfaithful." Onscreen, Lane has a masklike dissatisfaction and a heroic determination to cheer herself up. With a great script, she could become a sleeker, less intellectual Jeanne Moreau. This movie, though perfectly pleasant, does not have a great script. But I'm not knocking Wells's commercial reshaping of the book, which was probably necessary if Mayes's immersion in antiquities and curious risotto recipes was ever going to be turned into an acceptable narrative. Mayes's book is only one example of a flourishing publishing phenomenon: the many volumes devoted to the upper-middle-class American dream of getting away to a primal paradise of sunshine, sex, love, terra-cotta tiles, and huge salads with real tomatoes. Wells has kept those parts of the fantasy intact, and, if "Under the Tuscan Sun" snuggles comfortably into its cocoon of middlebrow formula, that's probably all any of us want from it--two hours of rustico charm.

Breathlessly, we wait for Him to appear--the lover who was not present in Mayes's book but is absolutely necessary to this kind of movie. Who will it be? It can't be the sweet-souled but happily married real-estate agent who obviously admires Frances, or any of the three Polish workmen at the villa, one of whom is a mere teen-ager. Frances goes to Rome to get away from the plaster dust, and there He is, right in the street, in the more than presentable person of Raoul Bova. Virile, with yard-wide shoulders, blue-green eyes, a sheepish smile, and a boxer's nose, he's all of Italian manhood in a white suit. He takes Frances off to Positano, his picturesque home town, in a black convertible. Wells then has a tricky problem on her hands: she wants to deliver the romantic payoff integral to the fantasy, but she wants to avoid cliches, too. She solves her problem by doing the sappy stuff and joking about it at the same time. Frances teases that the man's name is Marcello ("What else?"), that he talks just like an Italian in an American woman's fantasy. He then announces (I think), "I am going to make love all over your body." ("What did he say?" women around me kept asking.) The sex, however, is a little tame in comparison with the volatile encounters in "Unfaithful." The most active moment in the affair is Lane's teen-age leap of joy when she savors the thought of it.

Wells has shrewdly removed the note of self-satisfaction from Mayes's book. This Frances is not a household genius but a stumbling, self-conscious American who makes mistakes, recovers, finds her way. And the fantasy has been redeemed by an infusion of San Francisco humor. Frances's friend Patti (Sandra Oh), a pregnant Asian-American lesbian with a sharp wit, shows up in Tuscany. In romantic comedies made in the thirties the heroines often had funny unmarried sidekicks, but their sexual proclivities were never even hinted at, except by the cognoscenti. The openness of the gay behavior here is relaxed in its candor; and the unconventional new family that inhabits the villa helps take the snobbery out of the old daydream of an American lady bountiful who restores lazy Italy to its former glory. There is, however, one alien element in America's improving touch. As Frances contentedly picks grapes, Wells admires nearby fields of flowers, so entirely uniform in their appearance they seem to have been planted in order to ...