There’s nothing new under the sun in A Tourist’s Guide to Love – though there’s an awful lot of that sun, brightening every postcard shot in this featherweight Netflix romcom, and for viewers starved of warmth after a long, dreary winter, that’s enough of a lure. It follows a familiar arc: reeling from a breakup, a perky travel executive (Rachael Leigh Cook) takes a trip to Vietnam for notional work reasons, only to be swept off her feet by her charming local tour guide (Scott Lý). The film hits every holiday-romance beat you expect, but it hardly needs to shake things up: cinema has a proud and comforting tradition of stories in which a trip somewhere sunny and far away proves just the ticket for a character whose life has hit the skids.
My favourite example of the form – the fine wine to the budget lambrini of A Tourist’s Guide to Love – remains David Lean’s Summertime (oddly available to stream only on the free, ad-supported service Pluto). Its story of a buttoned-up, middle-aged American secretary splurging her savings on a long-desired trip to Venice and finding, with a suave Italian antique dealer, the kind of spontaneous romance she’s never known, is the platonic ideal of the genre: bathed in sunshine and Technicolor, the character blooms before our eyes, but the happy ending is compromised and complex, and richer for it.
