Under the Riccione Sun is an Italian comedy set on the packed beaches of Riccione, in Emilia-Romagna. A group of teenagers on holiday become friends almost at once, and their love lives tangle, loosen and tangle again around that friendship. The film came out on 1 July 2020 and streams on Netflix.

Niccolò Celaia and Antonio Usbergo direct, working together as YouNuts!, from a script by Caterina Salvadori and Enrico Vanzina. Comedy and romance are the genres, and the film stays inside both without apology. It never tries to become something else. That modesty is honest: it promises a pleasant afternoon, nothing heavier, and it delivers one.

The central group is Ciro (Cristiano Caccamo), Marco (Saul Nanni), Vincenzo (Lorenzo Zurzolo) and Camilla (Ludovica Martino). The premise fits in a line. Put a crowd of young people on a crowded beach and let the friendships form at the speed they do in real summers, which is almost instantly. Nobody needs a long introduction. They meet, they stick together, and the relationship troubles arrive on top.

The speed has a price. The ensemble feels like people who have only just found each other, and the cast has enough energy to make the premise work. But a story built on quick friendships has little room to dwell on any single thread. With four young leads and a stack of romantic complications, each strand gets a little time before the next one pushes it aside, and the film rarely goes back to see what the earlier ones left behind.

The result plays as a string of loosely linked episodes rather than one story. Some stretches are funny and light. Others seem to be waiting for the next change of scene. I never worked out which of the relationships the film considered the most important, and without that ranking the emotional stakes stay low. A comedy can survive this if the jokes land, and quite a few do. A romance is another matter, because it needs one couple to care about, and here the attention is spread too widely across the group. By the end I could tell you who had ended up near whom, but not whose story I had been following.

That is a shame, because the young cast is not the problem. Caccamo, Nanni, Zurzolo and Martino play off one another with an ease that suits the material, and the group scenes are where the film is most alive. When several of them share the frame, the banter has a rhythm that two people in a quiet scene never quite match. The weaker moments come when the film separates them and asks each to carry a private worry alone. The worries are real enough, but they are sketched rather than explored, and the performers are given little to push against.

Nor is the premise new. Teenagers meet on holiday, fall in love and learn something about themselves; that story has been told in many countries over many decades. The film’s answer to its own familiarity is the place. Riccione gives it a recognisable setting and a particular kind of Italian seaside crowd, and the feeling of everybody sharing the same stretch of sand is where much of the comedy gets its energy. That helps. But a location is not the same as an outlook. I wanted the script to say what it made of these young people once they were on the beach, and it mostly lets the crowd speak for it.

The credits carry more names than the four leads. Andrea Roncato is Gualtiero, Isabella Ferrari is Irene and Luca Ward is Lucio. Davide Calgaro plays Furio, Fotinì Peluso is Guenda and Matteo Oscar Giuggioli is Tommy. Setting a few better-known actors beside a young ensemble is a sensible choice for this kind of picture, because it widens the holiday beyond a teenage affair. I would have liked the film to ask more of these roles. They are pleasant to have around, but next to the sheer number of young characters they register as supporting players and little more, and Ferrari and Ward in particular deserve more room than the crowded story leaves them.

A sequel followed: Under the Amalfi Sun, released on 13 July 2022. Moving the same idea to another stretch of the Italian coast with a fresh set of young faces is a reasonable bet, and the bet seems to be on the setting and the season rather than on any one story.

It is a good-natured film, and it respects teenage feelings enough not to mock them. You could talk through half of it and lose nothing. If you want a story that stays with you after the credits, you will probably leave empty-handed. If you want a light evening with a likeable cast on a crowded beach, you will get exactly that.

It is a summer comedy about friends and first loves, played by a cast that is easy to spend time with. I smiled a fair number of times and remember few of the scenes. I wanted the film to pick one couple and stay with them through the closing stretch, and that is the one thing I kept wishing for as the last scenes drifted past.