Under the Riccione Sun (2020)

Under the Riccione Sun arrives from Italy with the modest ambition of putting attractive young people on a crowded beach and letting them sort out their romances. Directed by the duo known as YouNuts! and written by Caterina Salvadori and Enrico Vanzina, it follows a group of teenagers who become fast friends over a single summer, trading partners, misunderstandings and sunburns in roughly equal measure. The Adriatic does the heavy lifting. The plot does not.

The film's cultural ledger is remarkably clean. There is no color-conscious casting to speak of, the ensemble being a conventional Italian troupe of the photogenic and the tanned. No character announces a sexuality, interrogates a gender politics, or pauses the courtship to address structural inequality. Money exists only as a means of buying a drink. Nobody is heavy in a way the script feels compelled to resolve, nobody is neurodivergent in a way that demands a montage of mutual understanding, and the twentieth century does not intrude upon the shoreline. The environment appears solely as weather. Class amounts to which lido you can afford, and even that goes unremarked.

We are left with a film that simply wants to be pleasant, and mostly is. As a document of European light comedy before the sermon era, it holds a certain archival value, a snapshot of a genre that asked nothing of its audience except a tolerance for sand and mild confusion. Its sequel, Under the Amalfi Sun, moved the operation south two years later. The mission remained the same. Some will find that refreshing. Others will find it empty. Both parties are correct, and neither will be lectured at length about it.

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