Italian writer-director Nanni Moretti populates yet another film with familiar situations and hoary stereotypes that could have been plucked from any number of previous efforts.
Not everything labeled “old-fashioned” needs to carry negative connotations. A handwritten letter, your grandma’s rice pudding, the cocktail — all nice old-fashioned things. But the moment Alberto Iglesias’ sweet music flows out of the speakers at the start of “It Will Happen Tonight,” “old-fashioned” starts veering perilously into dowdy territory. When the camera zooms out as a couple kiss by the sea, things are heading swiftly towards fusty, and that inexorable journey continues through a Bruce Springsteen concert, a cutesy fantasy group dance to The Rolling Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow,” and pretty much everything else in Nanni Moretti’s latest Venice competition entry.
Though based on the short story collection “Hungry Heart” by Israeli novelist Eshkol Nevo, this is pure Moretti, turning on those moments in people’s lives when there’s a clear fork in the road and a path is chosen, whether right or wrong. Here eminently likeable Matteo (Louis Garrel) and Greta (Jasmine Trinca) casually meet when already attached to partners, think about each other for years, and wonder whether they’ve made the right life choices.
Unlike Celine Song’s “Past Lives,” an adult film about “what might have been” whose emotional core lies in its intelligence and its refusal to sentimentalize, “It Will Happen Tonight” leans in heavily towards the kind of lightweight romance that, for better or worse, feels out of place in today’s film festival world. While for the home crowd this is likely to be one of Moretti’s most popular movies in a long time, it’s hard to gauge how it will be received elsewhere. After all, aren’t paper-thin intrusive mothers and old Viagra-joking fathers just a wee bit passé?
Matteo’s Norwegian girlfriend Thea (Melina Åkerman) is pregnant and not keen on moving from Oslo to Rome, especially when his visiting mamma Agnese (Angela Finocchiaro) tells her she’s not fit to be a mother. Once Gregorio is born and the couple fly to Rome, Thea looks from the airport exit doors at Matteo’s family ignoring her and wisely decides to turn around, leaving the baby. Meanwhile in Mumbai, Greta’s boyfriend Carlo (Edoardo Purgatori) proposes in a very public way, but she can’t go through with it and instead calls daddy (Moretti himself) to get her out of there.
Seven years later — yes, this is the kind of movie that jumps seven, and seven, and then three — Matteo’s playing tennis with his brother Antonio (Andrea Lattanzi) when in walks Greta, looking stunning in a white dress. She kicks off her heels and takes up a racket as the music swells, the slow-mo closeups begin, and for Matteo it’s love at first sight. The problem is, she’s getting married next door to Federico (Antonio De Matteo), with whom she has a daughter, Anna (Elena-Marie Cicone).
This lovely vision in white won’t leave his mind, though he has no way of knowing who she is and besides, he’s got a dying father, Olivier (Hippolyte Girardot), to worry about. But the grim reaper can’t get him until father and son go to a Springsteen concert in San Sebastián, where randy Olivier has sex with the hotel receptionist (played for very poor laughs) and then, for reasons best known to Moretti, the stadium scenes linger through most of “Hungry Heart” and “Because the Night,” treating us to Garrel and Girardot swaying to the music and not much else. On the plane back to Rome, Olivier unsurprisingly gives up the ghost, preceded two seconds earlier by non-diegetic piano music superfluously clueing us in to what’s just about to happen.
San Sebastián is also where Matteo gets another glimpse of Greta, in town because she’s got a part in a movie there. This is the most problematic scene in the film: She’s wearing convincing aging prosthetics for her role (which is why Matteo doesn’t recognize her at first), frantically searching for her daughter Anna, who’s wandered off. When the child is found, she’s whispering to a little girl covered in flies who appears to be Roma. Surely Moretti should have realized the offensiveness of showing a street child crawling with insects, her mother oblivious, as if this is normal for “such people.” While designed to convey the idea of Anna as a child with a troubled inner life, the sequence goes nowhere and is never explained, nor does it fit with her later depiction as a depressed adolescent.
Seven years later, Matteo and Greta have a meet-cute in a café and he reveals his ongoing obsession. She’s got three kids, he’s married to Olivier’s former doctor Cristina (Elena Lietti), but despite her initial rejection of a tryst, the two embark on a passionate affair in his father’s old apartment, conveniently left empty all these years. Will they have the courage to leave their former lives and embrace the love they should have grabbed earlier? You’ll need to wait three more years to find out, but if you don’t already know where this is heading, you’ve not seen many movies.