The first thing that attracted me to this movie was its name — Tuscany. There was a movie called Under the Tuscan Sun in the early years, but this movie has nothing to do with that one. The main character is a talented chef who is strict about food and presentation and has been awarded several Michelin stars. He has to go to Tuscany to settle his inheritance because of his father’s death, which is a restaurant and a castle that his father ran for many years. Here he meets a late love.
The character of the hero has some expression in the beginning of the movie. Because of his strict requirements for food, he is also strict with his own staff and does not allow them to modify the menu he designed, not even to do a little novelty to try. He has no patience for customers who barge into his kitchen, and even loses his mind. He is grumpy and self-righteous, and adds flowers and plants to decorate everything he cooks, so much so that the heroine later laughs at him for being a horticulturalist.
The heroine is a maid who served her father for many years? Not quite sure about the background of the heroine, but I feel she is not Danish, dark skinned and never left Tuscany in her life. The scene where the hero and heroine meet for the first time is very funny, our hero is a demanding gourmet, the heroine’s service is very casual, because pouring water into the glass with ice was counted by the hero. The encounter actually started with a quarrel, but in the middle, because the woman wanted to get married, the man managed the wedding for the woman, and in the process the two of them fell in love. In fact, the two of them knew each other when they were small, and the heroine liked the hero when she was a child, but for some reason they couldn’t be together.
The hero seems to have always had a prejudice against his father, who is also supposed to be a famous local chef and once trained the hero to cook 1000 eggs. For some reason he left the hero and his mother. He ran a restaurant alone with the heroine until his death. The hero did not forgive his father until his death, until the heroine took out her father’s notebook that he had been treasuring, which had news of the hero’s awards. He resented his father and even smashed his statue. Later he finds the remnants of eggshells in the broken statue, which evokes his own memories, before he slowly lets go of his preconceived notions about his father and accepts reality. There is a scene in the movie where he moves his father’s statue to the stone bench where they often sit and enjoy the Tuscan sunset together.
The hero’s character also changed in the contact with the heroine, before he was harsh and impatient. The heroine’s character is casual and tolerant. When the two of them were making a recipe left by their father, the man asked her to pour him 1ml of red wine, but she didn’t listen to him and picked up a bottle of red wine and poured it into the pot, and the final taste was not bad at all. Later, after returning to Denmark to run his own restaurant, he was not so harsh on his own staff, and even began to take the initiative to praise the staff to make small changes.
There are no handsome men and women in this movie, there is only the beauty of Tuscany and exquisite cuisine. The main character is also a middle-aged man with a beer bottle belly, walking like a duck. But this is such a film, I think the production is just right. It’s like enjoying a painting. There is no ups and downs in the plot, there is no magnificent love, but so quietly watching the film, enough to bring the audience visual and spiritual enjoyment.
Perhaps cooking itself is a kind of cultivation. I hope I can travel to Tuscany sometime in the future, bring my beloved ones, taste the wine and local food there. Tuscany, you deserve it!
