Nanni Moretti directs this tender chronicle, Succederà questa notte (It Will Happen Tonight), loosely based on a short story collection by Eshkol Nevo (aptly named Hungry Heart), about a man who pursues who he thinks to be the love of his life over many years. Sugary sweet but never saccharine, at times heavy with the weight of a disillusionment with life, Moretti’s latest nevertheless feels more like a romcom masquerading as something a little more high brow than it does an actual reflection on the impact of divorce, affairs, and reconstructed families. But with Louis Garrel steering the ship, there is something truly beautiful at play here, and one need only choose to accept it for what it is to enjoy a kind-hearted and warm slice-of-life.
In the opening scene, Matteo (Garrel) and his pregnant girlfriend Thea (Melina Åkerman Kvie) are asked by the former’s mother to move to Italy – in her words, the latter is not ready to care for a child. Though she eventually accepts, Thea seizes up at the airport and returns home, leaving Matteo and his family to care for the baby. Years later, a still single Matteo is playing tennis with his brother when he encounters a bride on her wedding day, Greta (Jasmine Trinca), who plays a game with him before returning to the party. Charmed, Matteo never forgets her, and so it is that over the next years, the story follows their game of cat and mouse, running into each other whilst sojourning in the same place, bumping into each other at their local café, yet never quite available for each other.
Watching Matteo’s enchantment for Greta, so bewilderingly and beautifully played by Garrel, is an absolute treat, a fairytale-esque sense that she is meant for him. In fact, everything about Moretti’s film is a fairytale, from Matteo taking his father (Hippolyte Girardot) to a Bruce Springsteen concert amidst backs-and-forths to the hospital through to the needle drop of the year, in which Matteo and Greta dance in the street with an ensemble to The Rolling Stones’ She’s A Rainbow. There is a manic pixie dream girl quality about her, this mysterious woman who beats a frequent tennis player in her wedding dress, but then again, there is also a manic pixie dream boy quality about him, excitable, full of life and risk and strangeness. Alongside this playful tone Moretti injects death, divorce and affairs into the crux of his narrative, but it is never allowed to take precedence, nor does it ever really pack a punch – whether that it is to its detriment or not, when so much of the film is moving and refreshingly positive otherwise, is up for us to say.
Succederà questa notte (It Will Happen Tonight) screened at the London Film Festival.
