In case you missed the point, Wells sticks metaphorical sunflowers all over the place. Not that she needs them, since Lane is sunflower enough as a Mayes who has been fictionalized from her own book into a prototypical lost American, newly divorced and ripe for a transformative dive into another culture. Given consolatory tickets to a gay tour of Italy by best friend Patti (Sandra Oh) -- who can't use them, since she and girlfriend Kate Walsh are pregnant -- Frances leaves San Francisco to become the tour bus's straight mascot. Then she sees a crumbling villa called Bramasole and leaves the bus.
"Cliches merge at this navel of the world," writes our heroine early on, and she's not kidding. "Under the Tuscan Sun" plays as a warmly soothing yuppie-makeover daydream, and it goes down like limoncello -- sweet, not very good for you, but irresistible just the same. Frances hires a cute old contractor who hires a motley trio of Polish workers, and their work on the house proceeds at an amusingly bumpy pace, even as their employer whips up lunches that might cause a five-star sous-chef to break out in a cold sweat.
Frances also gets to play Miss Fix-it to her neighbors, including an olive farmer's teenage daughter (Giulia Steigerwalt) who falls for the youngest of the handymen (Pawel Szajda). There's also an aging, eccentric beauty (Lindsay Duncan) who once worked with Fellini -- that and a puckish replay of the fountain scene from "La Dolce Vita" are as close as "Tuscan Sun" gets to art. Eventually Frances oversees an entire rolling landscape of benevolent misfits, but still she's weepy and uncertain.
Enter Marcello -- you think this movie couldn't have a Marcello? Unlike in the book, Frances's love life is rehabilitated when she meets a young and elegantly masculine Positano cafe owner (Raoul Bova) who raises her temperature and self-esteem. Wells plays their romance to the hilt even as she lets the characters laugh at their own corny dialogue. She wants to have it both ways, and, remarkably, she does.
"Under the Tuscan Sun" is fairly ruthless as a chick flick -- at the screening I attended, cries of bliss greeted Marcello's declaration that he was going to "make love all over" Frances -- but moviegoers of all ages, genders, orientations, and religious creeds should respond to Lane, who advances on her work in "A Walk on the Moon" and "Unfaithful" and who here seems gorgeously normal. The actress holds on to Frances's sadness for the longest time -- in this strange country, it's the one link to what she knows -- and in letting it go by degrees she wins our heart. You come away enchanted less by the character than by the woman playing her.
The rest of the cast offers affectionate pleasures, from Oh's tart commentary in the best-pal role to Vincenzo Riotta as the graying, honorable, genteely sexy village fixer who becomes Frances's first local friend. He's married, but an adulterous romance like the one Katharine Hepburn had with Rossano Brazzi in "Summertime" is out of the question. "Under the Tuscan Sun" is both too smart and too timid for such notions: It's "Summertime" by way of Restoration Hardware.
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Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
