I doubt the success of 2018’s Book Club had all that much to do with its story – four older women rediscovering their sexuality by giggling over mentions of butt plugs in Fifty Shades of Grey – as it did the simple pleasure of watching Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen drink white wine and hang out in the most expensive kitchen you’ve ever set eyes upon. So audiences, I imagine, would have been perfectly satisfied if its Italy-set sequel, The Next Chapter, was nothing but two hours of these exquisitely dressed women sauntering around Rome and Venice, twirling bundles of spaghetti on their forks and drinking prosecco by the gallon.
Unfortunately, director Bill Holderman, and his co-writer Erin Simms, had other plans. Their film is so stuffed with incident – all of it preposterous, and occasionally insulting to the intelligence of its central quartet – that it sours what could (and should) have been a joyful celebration of desire and indulgence at any age. The Next Chapter, really, is the story of four obnoxious American tourists terrorising the people of Italy. Everything becomes a sexual innuendo, whether or not it actually makes sense. The locals are persistently inconvenienced by their blitheness, and at times outrightly harassed. And, without spoiling the finale, the women at one point cause what I’m fairly certain is a serious environmental hazard.
