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?
