‘It Will Happen Tonight’ San Sebastian Review: Nanni Moretti’s Sentimental Side Resurfaces In A Decades-Spanning Romance

Moving away from his years as a director of political comedies — combative in their own particular way — veteran Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti returns to his more classical, and at bottom rather sentimental, side. This is, to my taste, the less interesting register of the director of Caro Diario: one that has produced very good films (The Son’s Room), some passable ones (My Mother), and others that are frankly unwatchable (his recent Three Floors). One could say It Will Happen Tonight lands somewhere in the middle of that range — a fairly traditional dramatic comedy saved from tedium and soap-opera territory by its lighter, more humorous stretches.

Much as with the late-period work of Woody Allen, appreciating Moretti’s cinema is partly a matter of whether one already feels familiarity and affection for it, since the film itself doesn’t offer many reasons to justify outsized enthusiasm. It’s an old-school romantic comedy laced with family drama and a few drawing-room jokes, and Moretti — who plays a minor role here — draws intermittent value from it, especially when he indulges his own personal tastes: a charming musical number set to a Rolling Stones ballad, or scenes «captured» at a Bruce Springsteen concert in Spain.

Threaded through all of this are two parallel storylines that gradually converge into the saga of a seemingly impossible love affair. On one side is Matteo (Louis Garrel, speaking mostly in Italian), whose Norwegian partner (Melina Åkerman) leaves him because she can’t stomach the idea of moving to Rome and letting their baby be «raised» by his meddling Italian mother-in-law (Angela Finocchiaro). In parallel, Greta (Jasmine Trinca, a veteran of the Moretti universe) receives a marriage proposal from her boyfriend while the two are in India, and falls apart — she turns to her father (Moretti) for help and advice, and leaves her boyfriend before reaching the altar.

The film jumps forward seven years — the first of several such leaps — and delivers the first collision between the two. It’s a brief moment: Greta steps away from her wedding to another man (Antonio De Matteo) for a minute to play tennis with Matteo, who happens to be there with his brother. Each goes back to their own life, but Matteo is left shaken, smitten with this mysterious, seemingly impulsive woman. Life carries on for both of them — Matteo caring for his father (Hippolyte Girardot), whose health is failing even as he keeps trying (and apparently succeeding) to charm women, and starting another relationship of his own, while Greta, an actress, contends with a daughter of a difficult temperament. They’ll cross paths again in San Sebastian — mere meters from where I watched the film, as it happens — but neither will notice.

Years later, Greta and Matteo will cross paths once more, and this time they’ll have to reckon, more directly and more intricately, with the romantic history between them, and with the lives and realities each has already built separately: partners, parents, children, exes, and various other complications. Bit by bit, the light comedy with its Morettian flourishes loses ground, ceding space to something closer to the classic European dramas that deal with love affairs and everything they stir up in the people caught inside them, and in the lives of everyone connected to them.

It Will Happen Tonight still leaves room for humor — charming in places, decidedly old-fashioned and uninspired in others (almost everything involving Matteo’s father) — but what ultimately prevails is the romantic drama of this couple, who end up finding each other only once their lives already seem settled, neither expecting to face the radical upheaval that a love this sudden and intense brings on. But Moretti struggles to give real weight to a relationship that rarely strays from the most well-worn paths of romantic drama. The attempts to deepen each character’s conflicts through family circumstance — Greta’s daughter, Matteo’s ex — don’t add up to much, and the film gradually cedes ground to a register closer to soap-opera romantic misunderstandings.

Even so, and despite the conventions the now-septuagenarian Moretti deploys without a trace of irony, Succederà questa notte — adapted from several short stories by Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo — manages to convey, in part, the customary joviality with which the Italian director approaches certain intimate matters. There’s no room here for political humor, but there is room for amusing observations on family dynamics (Matteo’s mamma is a character to be feared), and especially for one of those brief, «silly» musical numbers so typical of the Italian regista‘s cinema. In those few minutes, any reservations fall away, and one simply surrenders to the warmth, charisma and humanity of a small group of actors dancing while, in the background, an old, beautiful Stones song plays about a girl who’s like the rainbow.