The Greeks, who had a god for every fold of existence, even coined one for the propitious moment: he was called Kairòs, he ran on winged heels and wore a tuft on his forehead and a shaved nape, so that he could only be grabbed as he arrived, never after he had passed. On the other hand, the old adage warns, the opportunity is ahead of you.
Here, It will happen tonight is a film populated by men and women who reach out towards that forelock with a heartbeat of delay, condemned to chase the right moment for an entire lifetime. It is no coincidence that the film carries on its forehead, like an epigraph, a question that is already its entire poetics: «I'll wait for you, as long as you want. But will it happen sooner or later?
It begins in the snow of Oslo, in a sauna, with two young bodies still tied together: she, Thea, is expecting a child; he, Matteo, is nineteen and has the face of someone who doesn't yet know that love, like Kairòs, must be seized upon. When her mother, an amazing Angela Finocchiaro, decides that the girl is too young and unfit to be a mother and that it is time to move to Rome, Thea responds with a slap and a refusal.
So Nanni Moretti, returning to the Venice Film Festival thirty-seven years after Palombella rossa and this time in Competition, chooses the most undermined territory of cinema, the love story, and crosses it on tiptoe, with Louis Garrel and Jasmine Trinca. The film is competing for the Golden Lion and was born, like Three Floors, from the pen of the Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo, this time from the stories of Legami.
Let's start, like a good theater master, with the aperitif: the news that precedes the film is the room that welcomes it.
Moretti's last film presented at the Festival dates back to 1989, Palombella rossa, which was also outside the main competition; since then his festival home has mainly been Cannes, where in his career he has brought nine of his feature films as director into competition and won the Palme d'Or in 2001 with The Son's Room. So much so that seeing him compete for the Golden Lion again at the Lido has the flavor of a reconciliation.
Despite the festival vulgarity, however, the author watered down any presumed resentment with the usual irony: he wasn't angry with Venice, his films were simply never ready in the summer; this time, having shot in autumn rather than spring, presenting it at the Festival seemed as natural as a coffee after lunch.
And Moretti is also an exhibitor, with his Nuovo Sacher Romano: a daily job, that of showing films to others, which does not know the director's pauses.
«Many years ago I coined a somewhat silly phrase», confessed Moretti on the Lido: I would like to always make the same film, possibly always better.
Here, over time the motto has been reversed and this time, thanks to the screenwriters Federica Pontremoli and Valia Santella, the author has imagined a restrained, almost modest love story. From Nevo's stories the trio gleaned now a relationship, now a character, sometimes just an image, to weave them into a single plot that spans the years, jumping forward seven and then three.
Matteo builds a life, Greta another. They meet, they get lost, they find each other again when it would be easier not to. Around them gravitate marriages, children, parents, fragility and those occasions that always arrive with exasperating punctuality: exactly when we are not ready.
Since time is the true co-protagonist, the film unfolds between a basketball game and a tennis set and draws a sentimental geography that goes from Oslo to Turin, where the bells also ring at night, from San Sebastián to the Rome of the Lungotevere, San Saba and the Flaminio.
Ultimately, it is a film about the need to name feelings and its key lines sound like maxims to be pinned on your wristband: when parents stop telling their children that they love them, things go to ruin; "let's forget about fate", cuts short Greta, a stoic novel; and the owner of the restaurant, a delightful Paolo Sassanelli, states with tavern wisdom that opportunities, like ears, travel in pairs.
So, against the single-tufted Kairòs, a hope emerges: a second opportunity, sooner or later, could arrive
Why It Will Happen Tonight is, first of all, an amorous merry-go-round in space and time, an invitation to a journey in which Oslo, Turin, San Sebastián and Rome become stations of desire. And precisely its fragmentary structure, daughter of Eshkol Nevo's stories from which the film freely takes its cues, ends up being an added value.
Not a novel that proceeds straight towards a solution, but a sentimental anthology made up of meetings, separations, returns, missed opportunities and others that perhaps are just waiting for the right time to present themselves. Fragmentation does not disperse the story: it multiplies it. Because even love, if you look closely, rarely has an orderly plot.
It is no coincidence that Moretti peppers the film with a small and delightful poetic declaration. A customer enters the bookshop that Matteo manages with his brother and is struggling with Miranda July's Tu more than anyone else: she can't finish that collection of short stories and would like something different, perhaps a novel, a story in which things were finally clearer.
And there the memory of Moretti runs irresistibly to The mass is over, to the lady who asked the priest for advice on the gift intended for an eight-year-old girl and was answered with a historic "who cares".
Except that Matteo is no longer that Nanni.
He doesn't react, he doesn't attack, he doesn't give lessons. He remains motionless, painful, almost silent in front of the woman's request. As if even Moretti had now accepted that life does not have the reassuring order of a novel and that feelings, above all, hate plots that are too well constructed.
It is perhaps here that Succederà Tonight finds its most authentic form. That phrase, that continually postponed promise - it will happen tonight - does not just indicate an appointment, but a way of being in the world.
Which night?
Moretti doesn't say it.
Because his film is an anthology of desire, almost fragments of a love discourse: the eternal struggle between those who demand all or nothing and those who learn to inhabit even what remains unfinished; between those looking for a novel capable of bringing order to chaos and those who, perhaps in bed, read The Golden Lord by Vivian Lamarque, where it is poetry, not narrative linearity, that deals with absences, expectations and desires.
There is even something of the late Almodóvar in this more melancholic, carnal and at the same time restrained Moretti. Not only because the music bears the signature of Alberto Iglesias, the Spanish filmmaker's historic traveling companion, but because of that way of now looking at love from the perspective of time, when the body begins to know its own finiteness while desire continues to behave as if it were immortal.
And there is a small scene, almost lateral, which ends up enclosing all this. On the plane that is taking Matteo and Thea to Italy, the man played by Stefano Abbati claims that those who are about to die no longer have any smell, because that smell has already evaporated. A phrase dropped almost by accident that continues to work under the skin: the body loses something, time takes away, life is consumed.
The desire, however, remains.
And then Moretti almost ends up in Franco Battiato's camp: «desires almost never grow old with age». It would be difficult to find a better epigraph for a film made up of people who continually arrive too early or too late and who, nevertheless, stubbornly continue to wait for their night.
Greta, a Divine name: the light of Jasmine Trinca
If there is a heart that beats in the film it is that of Greta, and it is impossible to separate it from the story that binds Moretti to his interpreter.
Twenty-five years ago some assistants went around Rome's high schools filming auditions lasting just a few seconds; the director saw a girl from Virgilio High School shot from afar, full-length, and instantly understood that she was a special presence. She wanted to be an archaeologist, she repeated it with affection even on the Lido, then the cinema won out: The Best of Youth, The Caiman, up until that close-up at the end of Il Sol dell'Avvenire in which Moretti found the same luminosity.
And above all, twenty-five years after The Son's Room, Moretti and Trinca find themselves father and daughter again on the screen.
So much so that, the actress admitted, for a quarter of a century she hadn't known why she had been chosen for The Son's Room: now she knows.
Ça va sans dire, this time it is the name of the character that betrays a destiny: like the Divine Greta Garbo, who in her sound debut, Anna Christie of 1930, claimed her whiskey with ginger ale, this Greta also lights up the screen with an oblique grace.
But it is the story of the method that reveals the secret of the film: Moretti removes the pauses, the poses, the charms - "away, away, away", Trinca recalled, fearing that nothing would remain of her - until something magical and not at all performative emerges.
The two lovers, explains the actress, speak to each other in a nursery rhyme language, because love is also the wise idiom of confused and surprised children who play the same game together. And Moretti carves out the small role of Greta's father.
Then there is a small revelation regarding the self-portrait.
Moretti confessed that he recognized himself not in his father, but in Matteo, Louis Garrel's character who passes through the film from the age of nineteen in Oslo to maturity: as if Moretti's alter ego had changed his face and even his nationality.
And it is almost a relief that the director did not listen to those in the room who urged him to play Matteo's father himself, a role instead entrusted to an impeccable Hippolyte Girardot, in perfect harmony with Garrel.
The French actor, for his part, repaid the admiration with a handful of anecdotes from the film library: Moretti "pope of cinema"; the basketball scene in which the director demands a basket and then, with the good-natured cruelty of the coach, imposes twenty-five takes on him; the bitter disappointment of the Japanese scooter instead of the dreamed Vespa, denied with a dry "no self-citations".
Here, in that "no self-citations" there is all the discipline of a cinema that continues to look at itself in the mirror while trying not to mirror itself too much, that knows its own tics perfectly and for this very reason tries not to transform them in a manner.
As always in Moretti, music is not wallpaper but the engine of the story, or rather fuel.
This time, the working-class rigor of Bruce Springsteen and the aristocratic lasciviousness of the Rolling Stones coexist in a sonic oxymoron. The Boss is an ancient love: Moretti saw him at the Flaminio Stadium in 1988 and the Springsteenian universe also entered Palombella rossa, where I'm on Fire already accompanied his water polo players.
Here Springsteen is even filmed live in San Sebastián, where Matteo accompanies his elderly and happy-go-lucky father to immerse himself in the concert crowd.
Their Satanic Majesties, on the other hand, lend the film a She's a Rainbow whose license, said the producer Domenico Procacci, has pulverized his previous personal record for musical spending, that of Keith Jarrett of Caro diario.
The music of Alberto Iglesias, Pedro Almodóvar's fetish composer, stitches it all together.
And if the film passes through Turin, its liquid roots inevitably come to mind: the Savoy city is the home of vermouth, that fortified and flavored wine that tastes of herbs and twilight melancholy, just like this story.
Without telling too much about the point of arrival, there is finally a moment that becomes the secret heart of the film: a performance in which some actors lend body and voice to Cesare Pavese, Italo Calvino, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Albert Camus, reading passages from their love letters.
It is not an erudite whim, but a keystone. In fact, each of those correspondences tells of the need to name love.
There is Woolf who writes to Vita, there is the arsonist Mayakovsky who consumes himself for Lilja Brik, there is the epistolary relationship between Camus and the actress Maria Casarès. Words entrusted to paper because life, alone, is not always able to say what it feels.
And it is here that the film finds perhaps its simplest and most radical gesture: to express the feelings before it is too late. Entrusting to words what time continues to postpone.
Because in Moretti the key moments are not just those on a concert stage or in a big statement, but the tiny and decisive ones in which someone finally finds the courage to say what they feel.
It will happen tonight is therefore not a film about love as a certainty.
It is a film about love as a possibility.
And, above all, on the obstinacy of waiting for it.
