Nanni Moretti’s It Will Happen Tonight turns a decades-long missed-connection romance into a sweeping Venice competition drama, with Louis Garrel and Jasmine Trinca playing two people who repeatedly cross paths but struggle to find the right moment to be together.
The film, titled Succederà questa notte in Italian, follows Matteo and Greta through relationships, marriages, family crises and chance encounters across several cities and years.
Based on Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo’s Hungry Heart stories, the 1-hour-43-minute film mixes romance and comedy with illness, grief and the consequences of choices made at different points in life.
Louis Garrel and Jasmine Trinca play star-crossed lovers
Garrel plays Matteo, a young man whose relationship in Oslo breaks down after the birth of his son. He eventually returns to Rome, where his complicated relationship with his domineering mother adds another layer to his personal life.
Trinca plays Greta, who is living in Mumbai when her boyfriend unexpectedly proposes. Unsure about marriage, she turns to her father for advice.
The two characters do not immediately become a couple. Instead, their lives keep intersecting at unlikely moments.
Seven years after their first parallel introduction, Matteo is playing tennis in Rome when Greta appears next door in a wedding dress. She is about to marry another man.
For Matteo, the encounter becomes an instant obsession. But Greta has already chosen another life, leaving the pair separated once again.
A romance built around missed chances
The central idea of It Will Happen Tonight is simple: What happens when two people who seem meant for each other keep meeting at the wrong time?
Moretti repeatedly moves the story forward by several years. Children are born, relationships change, parents become ill and careers evolve while Matteo and Greta continue moving through separate lives.
Their repeated encounters eventually become harder to dismiss as coincidence.
The film travels between Rome, Oslo, Turin, San Sebastián and Mumbai, giving the romance a deliberately expansive feel.
That structure also creates some of the movie’s biggest weaknesses. Both reviews note that the story requires viewers to accept a large number of coincidences, while Variety describes the film as a light and predictable romantic comedy.
Moretti mixes comedy with darker moments
Moretti does not present the romance as a completely serious affair.
There are comic moments involving Matteo’s family, including his father Olivier, played by Hippolyte Girardot. Matteo’s father is seriously ill and has one major wish: to attend a Bruce Springsteen concert.
Father and son eventually travel to Spain for the concert, creating one of the film’s more emotional sequences before Olivier dies.
The film repeatedly moves between humor and sadness, a tonal shift that has been a defining feature of Moretti’s work.
That balance works better in the earlier sections than in the film’s later stretch, when the romance becomes increasingly melodramatic.
The film becomes more melodramatic
As Matteo and Greta move through their lives, the story introduces more complications, including marriages, children, illness and family problems.
Eventually, the pair begin an affair after another encounter, despite both having established families.
The question then becomes whether they will finally abandon the lives they built and pursue the relationship they have delayed for years.
The answer may be predictable, but Moretti is less interested in surprise than in the emotional consequences of repeatedly choosing one path over another.
A Venice competition film with mixed reactions
It Will Happen Tonight premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival, marking another major festival appearance for the veteran Italian filmmaker.
Moretti has spent decades moving between political satire, personal comedy and darker human dramas. His new film represents a noticeable shift toward a more traditional romantic melodrama.
The response reflected that change.
The Hollywood Reporter described the movie as a high-end arthouse soap with humor, praising its watchability while arguing that its melodrama can become excessive.
Variety was considerably cooler, calling it a light and predictable romcom and questioning whether its old-fashioned romantic style will connect with audiences outside Italy.
Is ‘It Will Happen Tonight’ worth watching?
The film will likely appeal most to viewers who enjoy European romantic dramas built around relationships, coincidence and the passage of time.
Garrel and Trinca give the central romance enough charm to carry the film through some of its more improbable turns, while Moretti brings his familiar mixture of humor and melancholy.
But viewers looking for a tightly constructed or unpredictable love story may find the repeated coincidences and increasingly sentimental final act harder to accept.
At its core, It Will Happen Tonight is about timing: two people can feel an immediate connection and still spend years unable to act on it.
Moretti turns that idea into an old-fashioned, sometimes funny and sometimes overly dramatic romance that follows its characters long after their first encounter.
