It Will Happen Tonight

It has been a long time since veteran art house director Nanni Moretti opened a film in Venice, the last one being Palombella rossa in 1989, a small but influential work that traced the ideological crisis of the Italian left and conflated it with the director’s own personal crisis. In the intervening decades, he has had nine films in competition in Cannes, with one of them – the moving drama The Son’s Room – winning the Palme d’Or and new audiences.

After health issues slowed completion of It Will Happen Tonight (Succederà questa notte), Venice became the festival of choice, which is appropriate for a film that is all about the timing of love affairs. It is a quieter, less caustic work than his fans are used to, and it puts the left-wing politics for which Moretti is known in the back drawer, but follows the personal thread in an intelligent and charming rom com that often feels like a bouncy French film, thanks to the dominating presence of Louis Garrel as Moretti’s on-screen alter ego and Hippolyte Girardot as his aging, last-fling dad.

The screenplay, which Moretti cowrote with his regular writers Federica Pontremoli and Valia Santella, is once again an amalgam of stories and characters from noted Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo, whose book Three Floors inspired Moretti’s 2021 film of the same title. This time the central character is Matteo (Garrel), a curly-haired version of the director but a generation younger. Same posture, same clothes, same attachment to family – even the same Vespa and white helmet, in case there is any doubt.

Matteo’s first romantic entanglement is with Thea, a clean-cut Norwegian girl who is pregnant with his child. The first gag is quick coming: while they are sitting in a sauna on a boat, his mom (Angela Finocchiaro) calmly announces she will be raising the baby because Thea is not fit to be a mother. In reality, Thea is completely unsure she wants to move to Italy and be part of Matteo’s big family.

Second relationship. He is playing tennis with his brother while a wedding party is taking place nearby. Suddenly the bride Greta (Jasmine Trinca) appears on the court in her wedding dress and asks to play a round. Matteo is smitten, but the timing is bad: she just got married to Carlo, a nice guy who loves her.

The family dynamics are complicated but understandable, showing the screenwriters are on top of their game. Matteo’s dad is in the hospital with a heart condition, but his doctor Cristina (Elena Lietti) allows him to travel to Spain with Matteo to fulfil a lifetime dream to see Bruce Springsteen in concert. While they’re in San Sebastian, he also takes Viagra and has hours of sex with a hotel employee, all of which creates a major problem for Matteo on the way home.

His third relationship is with Cristina, the lonely doctor who he marries and who takes over a maternal role with his son, abandoned by his mother Thea. Their marriage is jeopardized by the return of the passionate non-conformist Greta to his life. Trinca is in great form as a sensual woman madly in love, and her unveiled trysts with Matteo in a spacious empty apartment bring Last Tango in Paris to mind. The problem is always bad timing – they’re both married to other people and Greta swears she’ll never leave Carlo.

There is plenty of material here for a long film, but Moretti keeps things tight and the action is full of surprises. It’s a pleasant comedy that swings effortlessly from an unexpected musical dance number on the street to The Rolling Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow”, to serious sentiments and obsessions that threaten to destroy a lifetime of carefully constructed relationships. Yet no one will complain if love triumphs in the end.