Love Me, Love Me: A Love Difficult to Call Such

June is an American girl who has just moved to Italy to try and start over after the tragic death of her brother. She enrolls at Saint Mary's in Milan, a prestigious international elite school for rich kids or those of noble origin. On her first day of school, she meets both Will, a shy and kind student, and his best friend James, the classic bad boy who moonlights as an MMA fighter in underground matches.

The protagonist of Love Me, Love Me starts a relationship with the former but at the same time feels increasingly attracted to the latter, initiating an increasingly ambiguous and dangerous love triangle. Keeping secrets won't be easy, and when she finally has to come to terms with her feelings, she will discover that in love there are no half measures and you can't have one foot in two shoes.

The Same Story

As in the worst young-adults, no one at the school is, of course, who they seem to be: everyone hides dark secrets, masked identities, traumatic pasts that slowly but inevitably come to light and justify – but then who knows why this need to justify at all costs – problematic, if not totally deplorable, behaviors. And the toxic love of Love Me, Love Me, a title as deceptive as it gets, which doesn't reveal the forced sentimentality characterizing the hour and a half of viewing, fits squarely into a genre that is very popular among young people, with all the consequences that entails.

In this case too, we are faced with a work born on Wattpad, this time entirely Italian, both concerning the book and its live-action adaptation discussed here. The author is Stefania S. (pseudonym of Stefania Serafini) and the saga, published in print by Sperling & Kupfer, already has two volumes.

More Damaging Than Dangerous Temptations

It must be said that compared to the written pages, there has been a substantial change of setting: where on paper the story took place in Laguna Beach, California, here Milan is the stage for the protagonists' romantic turmoil. However, the choice was made to maintain the English language, with the school for foreign students, in order to more easily appeal to an international audience, now accustomed to stories of this type.

It's quite striking that Roger Kumble sits behind the camera, who at the end of the last millennium gave us a cult teen classic par excellence such as Cruel Intentions (1999), a film capable of shocking and disturbing audiences of the time. A blessing but also a curse for him, which has seen him return on several occasions to the "scene of the crime" trying to intercept the tastes of teenagers, as with the After or Beautiful Disaster sagas, there too with not exactly memorable results.

In Love Me, Love Me we are faced with yet another back-and-forth, at times exhausting, which sees the blonde protagonist unable to decide between her two suitors, one more reassuring and the other tempestuous, with the presence of secondary figures who risk undermining the passionate tribulations in progress up to hypothetical points of no return. As on other occasions, there are no shortage of crime subplots, with the world of underground fights as a means to trigger gratuitous tension-building solutions, and the parents turn out to be almost useless presences, almost completely uninterested in the lives of those children whose existences are lost and empty partly because of them.

The main problem remains, in any case, the highly questionable message promoted, complete with James's introduction immediately portraying him as a strongly manipulative boy, to the point where he forcibly takes June into the men's locker room, despite her fierce resistance. But it is only one of the controversial scenes that follow one another in a narrative populated by implausibilities and assorted indecencies, with alcohol, drugs, and steroids as a further backdrop of perdition for a burned-out youth of the latest generation.