Under the Amalfi Sun [Sotto il sole di Amalfi] *** (2022, Lorenzo Zurzolo, Ludovica Martino, Isabella Ferrari, Luca Ward, Davide Calgaro) – Classic Movie Review 12,499

Lorenzo Zurzolo.

Lorenzo Zurzolo and Ludovica Martino return as Vincenzo and Camilla in director Martina Pastori’s 2022 Italian romantic comedy-drama film Under the Amalfi Sun [Sotto il sole di Amalfi], the warm and welcome sequel to the 2020 film Under the Riccione Sun.

It’s just what’s wanted from a sequel: the mixture exactly as before, entertaining, carefree and escapist, with enjoyable performances from an ensemble cast, also including Isabella Ferrari as Irene, Luca Ward as Lucio, and Davide Calgaro as Furio, All five returning actors are very good value.

It follows probably the most promising strand of the multi-drama original, turning it into a single drama. A year after their romance began in the picturesque tourist and nightlife party town of Riccione in northern Italy, blind boy Vincenzo and his new love Camilla, who has had to leave for study work in Canada, reunite for a vacation on the picturesque Amalfi Coast in southern Italy, and put their love to the test. Camilla is offered another year of work back in Italy, and wonders if she’s up for a lifetime of commitment to a blind man. Vincenzo’s mother Irene and her new lover Lucio, the bar bouncer in the first film, turn up unexpectedly, breaking their car journey south for an unexpected extended stay, and so later does Vincenzo’s father, equally unexpectedly, for the boy’s birthday.

It is written by Caterina Salvadori and Enrico Vanzina, with a view to mixing the romantic and the amusing, and doing it pretty successfully too. It’s a film it would be hard to take against, unless of course you hate laughs and romance. There’s no dark side here, and that’s nice once in a while. All the characters are pleasant. Maybe there is a single villainous character, and that’s all.

Returning Davide Calgaro as nice comedy sidekick Furio, still forlornly looking for love, is again good fun, but the film’s downside is that some of the other nice actors and characters from the original are missing, and new actors and characters Kyshan Wilson as English Nathalie and Nicolas Maupas as German Hans aren’t much in the way of substitutes. Nathalie and Hans’s improbable affair is a limp one. And with these characters, it seems less Italian this time disappointingly. Where is Cristiano Caccamo as Ciro? Surely some space could have been found for him.

The cast are Lorenzo Zurzolo as Vincenzo, Ludovica Martino as Camilla, Isabella Ferrari as Irene, Luca Ward as Lucio, Davide Calgaro as Furio, Kyshan Wilson as Nathalie, Nicolas Maupas as Hans, Elena Funari as Rebecca, Marit Nissen as Brigitte, Raz Degan as David, Andrea Occhipinti as Roberto, Naomi Piscopo as Anna, Ugo Piastrella as the electrician, and Carla Ferraro as the fortune teller.

Luckily Cristiano Caccamo found other work that year, the films Jumping from High Places, and Bla Bla Baby, as well as a couple of TV shows. He starred in the 2018 gay romance My Big Gay Italian Wedding.

© Derek Winnert 2023 – Classic Movie Review 12,499

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