‘It Will Happen Tonight’ review: Nanni Moretti’s latest is unashamedly melodramatic Italian romance

Dir: Nanni Moretti. Italy/France/Spain. 2026. 103mins

There’s a moment around halfway through veteran Italian auteur Nanni Moretti’s latest film when a couple’s loving, intimate dance to the Rolling Stones song ’She’s A Rainbow’ spills out into a handsome golden-hour Roman street and becomes a fully-choreographed flashmob-style dance sequence. It’s joyous but also eloquent in its understanding of love’s power to light up whole neighbourhoods. It’s also the best thing about It Will Happen Tonight, a mostly charming romantic melodrama that, at times, plays like a TV soap with much better production values.

Undeniably potent pairing of Louis Garrel and Jasmine Trinca 

That said, big chunks of Almodovar do the same. Both he and Moretti – who here poaches his Spanish colleague’s go-to composer, Alberto Iglesias – know that people watch TV soaps because they take us into a heightened romantic otherspace, because they arrange the randomness of life into meaningful narratives. This is exactly what It Will Happen Tonight does, sometimes a little flatly, sometime more elegantly or winsomely, in a film that feels a little like the swansong of a director who long ago stopped caring what the critics think. 

Coupled with Moretti’s trademark touches of wry humour – dosed out here sparingly – and the undeniably potent pairing of Louis Garrel and Jasmine Trinca as the long-deferred lovers at the heart of a story that spreads out over almost 20 years, It Will Happen Tonight will cajole its way onto arthouse screens following its Venice competition premiere and berths in Toronto, Zurich and London – beginning with Italy and France, two countries where Moretti is an institution. Elsewhere, Iglesias’ unashamedly romantic score – performed by a pared-back orchestral ensemble that occasionally swings into jazz mode – and a succession of eye-candy locations that in addition to Rome include Turin, Oslo and San Sebastian should work to win over audiences looking for light-hearted Euro fare.

This is the second time, after the poorly-received Three Floors (2021), that Moretti and his longtime co-writers Federica Pontremoli and Valia Santella have adapted a work by Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo. Here it’s a short story collection, which has been raided piecemeal, with some of the stories providing only minor characters or the briefest of scenes. Garrel plays Matteo, the offspring of a long-since dissolved union between a sharp-tongued Italian mother and a skirt-chasing French father with a weak heart. A prelude set in Norway sees Matteo hitched to a local girl, but she soon exits the scene, leaving him to look after their new-born son. Seven years later (you need to pay attention to these timeline captions, they mount up) comes a meet-cute when Jasmine Trinca’s Greta, bored at her own wedding, wanders onto the Rome country-club court where Matteo is playing tennis with his brother and challenges him to a game.

Years pass before the pair meet again, by which time Matteo is working in a Roman bookshop near a café with what looks like untouched 1960s décor not far from his by-now deceased father’s apartment, empty except for a beautiful analogue hi-fi system and an extensive collection of vinyl. There’s an element of self-indulgence present in many of the film’s details; bookshops, old Roman cafes, vinyl played on good speakers, an empty apartment where motes of dust dance in sunbeams.

It’s a tribute to Trinca’s impassioned performance that feisty, sympathetic Greta’s story rises to the fore, balancing the script’s over-indulgence of Matteo, who is, when you scratch the rose-tinted surface, a selfish, spoiled mother’s boy with a nice smile. Played twinklingly by Hippolyte Girardot, Matteo’s lascivious father Olivier is another unreconstructed male who gets a free pass as he beds a young hotel receptionist for comic effect.

It Will Happen Tonight does make some attempt to probe the complexity of families, especially in a side story regarding Greta’s daughter Anna, who skips school to drift alone through Rome, insulated by her huge headphones. Doors and windows that separate characters or bring them together, the refusal of an actress on a film set to fall when she’s shot, echoed later by a small child’s similar action in a school play, the tolling of church bells – these things give some symbolic resonance to a lovingly shot, colour-saturated story – though the symbolism is very much of the do-it-yourself variety.