Toscana introduces Theo (Anders Matthesen), a Danish chef from the Michelin end of the trade, as a man who meets the world with a clenched jaw, and it wastes little time explaining why. Mehdi Avaz, who wrote the screenplay with Nikolaj Scherfig, has made a romantic comedy-drama about someone who turns nearly every feeling into irritation. The film’s best instinct is to read that irritation as a shield. It is a small idea. For most of the film it holds.

The setup is plain. Theo travels to Tuscany to sell his father’s business and meets Sophia (Cristiana Dell’Anna), a local woman who makes him reconsider how he lives and how he loves. Films about ill-tempered chefs are a crowded shelf by now, and this one does not pretend otherwise. What it does is pick its ground with care. Tuscany has a firm sense of itself, known for its wine, its table and its centuries of art, and the film borrows the ethic that goes with that reputation: do the simple things well, and don’t hurry them. A cook who lives at a sprint is out of place there before anyone has said a word. The film seems to know it, and it asks to be judged by the same standard.

Matthesen gives Theo a hard edge and a body that never quite unclenches, so it is easy to see why Sophia keeps her distance at first. Dell’Anna has the more interesting job. Her Sophia listens more than she talks, has a life that plainly predates Theo, and declines to rearrange it around his moods. That keeps the film out of the familiar pattern where a woman exists to repair a difficult man. Andrea Bosca as Pino and Ghita Nørby as Inge are welcome company, though the film gives them less to do than the cast list promises.

It is at its best when it leaves room. About fourteen minutes in, Theo finishes a confrontation while Ornella Vanoni’s “L’appuntamento” plays, and the song sits under the scene instead of filling it. The tension drains at its own speed. Music databases list only a couple of songs for the film, so each cue has air around it. Some critics have singled out how eloquent the film is about what it leaves unsaid, and this scene shows what they mean.

The comedy is the shakier half. The laughs are mild and lean too often on Theo’s grumpiness, which is a fine starting point and a poor engine. Around him, Svend (Christopher Nissen), Zeuten (Sebastian Jessen) and Melanie (Karoline Brygmann) fill out his world without settling into a register of their own: too light to be pointed, too thin to be funny. The sale of the father’s business, the reason for the whole journey, works as a premise more than as a pressure. It is announced, then left to sit, and it never picks up the dramatic weight the story seems to want from it.

What the film gets right is refusing the loud version of its own story. The romance is unhurried, and Avaz seems more interested in what Theo cannot say than in a grand declaration. The film appears to hold that people voice love and loss through anger, and it mostly has the sense not to say so aloud. Nobody will be startled by the route, and the destination is easy to guess, but the attention to gesture over plot twist gives the genre a slower pulse than usual.

The same reticence turns on the film in places. Inge is the clearest case: the film has us notice her and then declines to use her. Restraint that works between Theo and Sophia reads here as avoidance. The emotional payoff suffers too. When Theo finally lowers his guard, the moment lands lighter than it should, because the stretch before it has not gathered enough weight for it to fall on.

What holds Toscana together is the pairing. Dell’Anna will not let Sophia become a tool for fixing a man, and when the two reach something like honesty, it feels earned by accumulation rather than by one big turn. That counts for a lot in a genre that usually hurries this part. So here is where I land. As a comedy, Toscana under-delivers. As a slow, watchful romance about a man learning to lower his voice, it mostly works, and the two leads carry it past its thin supporting material. Watch it for them, and expect a good deal less from the jokes.