Under the Riccione Sun Parent Guide

“Seducing women is an art,” Gualtiero (Andrea Roncato) tells his new boarders. The young men have come to spend a few months in Riccione, a seaside resort on Italy’s Adriatic coast, and are hoping for summer love. Given the notches on Gualtiero’s bedpost, the young men listen carefully as the aging Casanova shares his advice in the fine art of seduction. Marco (played with earnest nerdiness by Saul Nanni) hopes that following these tips will lead to success with Guenda (Fotini Peluso) the girl he has been hopelessly in love with for five years.

This is only one of the many romantic plots that weaves its way through the Italian rom-com, Under the Riccione Sun. Other storylines include a blind young man who’s trying to break free of his over-protective mother, a young woman disillusioned by the boyfriend who takes her for granted, the lifeguard who falls for his girlfriend’s best friend, and so on. The plotlines may differ in the details, but they share common content concerns – sexual activity and innuendo, drug and alcohol use and frequent profanity. The 39 sexual expletives are definitely excessive and pop up in casual conversation.

Clearly, the biggest concern for parents of teen age viewers will be the dialogue around “seducing” women – and Gualtiero’s accounts of romancing and lying to women in order to get them into his bed. Fortunately, the young men in the film mature over the course of the story and develop a more nuanced view of relationships. If only that led them to either delay sexual activity or have discussions about contraception with the young women involved…

I can’t recommend Under the Riccione Sun for teen viewing, thanks largely to its cavalier attitude towards sexual activity and drug and alcohol use. But it does have a redeeming feature – the mainstreaming of a disabled character. Vincenzo (Lorenzo Zurzolo) is blind but that doesn’t stop him from either making friends with guys his own age or falling in love with Bea (Maria Luisa De Crescenzo). The screenwriters managed to avoid the “Tiny Tim” trap, instead treating Vincenzo like a normal person who happens to be blind.

Disabled representation aside, Under the Riccione Sun, has little to recommend it. The plots are not original, the acting is occasionally stilted, and the dialogue is dreadful (although, to be fair, that might be a translation problem. The movie is in Italian with subtitles which might not be completely accurate.) The music is also terrible. I’m no expert in Italian pop music, but the stuff they’re playing in this flick sounds like public domain tunes pulled off the internet. The best part of this movie is the setting – I didn’t fall in love with the movie, but Riccione may very well make it onto my bucket list.