“No Place to be Single” is a scenic but featherweight Italian romance set in the most popular region of Italy for film romances — Tuscany.
Based on a novel by the prolific Italian romance novelist Felicia Kingsley, it’s got sex and sun and soap operatic plot twists and a premise that nobody bothered to Google, making the entire scenario ludicrous.


A fairytale set up promises that this Tuscan town, Belverde, is where “people fall in love with one another as if by magic” (in Italian or dubbed into English). Nothing that follows comes close to “magic.”
And when you blow the “meet cute” in such romances, it’s all downhill from there.
Elisa (Matilde Gioli (“Runner,” “Cativa conscienza”) is the one woman in Belverde who rejects love. She lives and farms on the land of an aged count, where her family has long worked the land raising apples, grapes for wine and olives for olive oil.
Her mother (Cecilia Dazzi) and younger sister Giada (Amanda Campana) don’t seem to “get” why Elisa isn’t falling for a local dullard who pines for her. But maybe the story of how she’s raising a teen daughter, Linda (Margherita Rebeggiani), by herself explains that.
The count dies, and his distant nephews Michele (Cristiano Caccamo of “Under the Riccione Sun”) and Carlo (Sebastiano Pigazzi) stand to inherit that land. As Michele is a struggling deal-maker with a Milan development firm, this could be “our once-in-a-lifetime chance” at breaking through. Carlo? He’s a layabout, just along for the ride.
They come to Belverde where Elisa gives Michele her sales pitch for “plans” for improving the farm, turning on the charm as she does. As this is based on a romance novel, of course they knew each other as children. Or course they meet when he bonks her on the head at the church funeral of his uncle.
Carlo, meanwhile, is chased and charmed by Giada — who is already in love with a married creep in this gossipy little town. Giada is Elisa’s plan B. The younger sister will convince, by hook or seductive crook, Carlo to stand against selling the place.
Perhaps, as the locals say, “It’ll all be handled by karma.” Or maybe somebody will do the math on pitching “10 prime hectares” of beautiful Italian countryside to a boorish, cowboy-hatted American golf course developer.
Ten hectares, for the slow romance novelists, screenwriters and Italian directors in the back of the class, amounts to just under 25 acres. As golf courses are typically 150-200 acres, perhaps this pseudo-Texan American owns a chain of putt putts?
The scenery is the highlight of the movie whose title is as clunkily unromantic in Italian — “Non è un paese per single” — as it is in English. Gioli is properly fiesty in her dressed-down farmgal scenes and dolled up to runway ready status for Elisa’s big “Night out with womanizer Michele” scene. Caccamo is underwhelming.
Subplots include Giada’s much-gossipped-about fling with an olive oil-making creep and Elisa’s daughter Linda’s rash efforts to lose her virginity to anyone but her unsure-of-his-sexuality-bestie.
They don’t hold one’s interest any better than the primary plot. With three credited screenwriters and a director not “improving” Kingsley’s tediuously formulaic tale, it’s no wonder they didn’t bother to look up how BIG golf courses are and how they’re falling out of vogue as developments in most of the world.
Even boorish American developers in cowboy hats know how many acres there are to a hectare. Well, some do.
Rating: TV-MA, sex, nudity, profanity, pot use
Cast: Matilde Gioli, Cristiano Caccamo, Amanda Campana, Sebastiano Pigazzi, Margherita Rebeggiani and Cecilia Dazzi.
Credits: Directed by Laura Chiossone, scripted by Alessandra Martellini, Giulia Magda Martinez and Matteo Visconti, based on a Felicia Kingsley novel. An MGM release on Amazon Prime.
Running time: 1:42

