05/09/2026 - VENICE 2026: Nanni Moretti once again adapts Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo with a passionate melodrama that oscillates between the joyful and the melancholic, and packs in all the hallmarks of his cinema

Louis Garrel and Jasmine Trinca in It Will Happen Tonight

All the “Nanni movie” staples are here: French actors, the scooter, a game of tennis or basketball, someone singing a famous song, someone dancing to a famous song, Rome, his dearest literary references... With It Will Happen Tonight, in competition at the Venice Film Festival, Nanni Moretti returns to drawing from his beloved Eshkol Nevo, as he did with Three Floors, in competition at Cannes in 2021, which disappointed many of his admirers. This time, together with screenwriters Federica Pontremoli and Valia Santella, he weaves together several short stories by the Israeli author, such as Hungry Heart and the one that lends the film its title.

With It Will Happen Tonight, however, the director raises the stakes and takes more risks. Not only because he unexpectedly treats his audience to several exhilarating minutes from the concert that Bruce Springsteen gave in San Sebastián in June of last year, and a couple of scenes of pure erotica featuring a fully nude Jasmine Trinca, the actress Nanni introduced us to 25 years ago with The Son's Room. Above all, it's because the 73-year-old auteur fashions a romantic melodrama hurtling at full speed towards a guardrail of regrets - one that exalts the power and depth of feelings and of life itself, ever ready to offer each of us another chance.

At the heart of It Will Happen Tonight is the relationship between Matteo (Louis Garrel) and Greta (Trinca), whose lives cross paths several times over the course of 14 years. The film opens in Oslo, where Matteo marries Thea (Melina Åkerman), a Norwegian woman with whom he’s expecting a child. Matteo’s determined mother (Angela Finocchiaro) insists the couple move to Italy (“You’re not capable of raising a child,” she opines), where the baby can be brought up with the help of the whole family. Seven years later, Thea has vanished, and Greta bursts into Matteo’s life, dressed as a bride, while he’s playing tennis with his brother. The two meet again in San Sebastián, where she, an actress, is shooting a film and Matteo has taken his ailing father Olivier (Hippolyte Girardot) to see "The Boss", whom Olivier has been chasing for years. As Springsteen launches into "Because the Night", Olivier falls ill and dies shortly afterwards. Seven years on, Matteo has married the doctor who treated his father (Elena Lietti), and by chance, he runs into Greta, very much engrossed in her teenage daughter’s crisis, near his bookshop (there’s a customer asking him for a book by Miranda July, and here, Nanni lets us in on his recent reading). This time, he confesses his love fully, and the two soon become lovers. They meet again in the old house full of Olivier’s vinyl records. Here, they dance to the Rolling Stones’ "She’s a Rainbow". She reads him verses from Il signore d’oro by Vivian Lamarque, a narrative poem about an unresolved, impossible love - that of a patient for her psychoanalyst. When he asks her to leave her family and live with him, Greta replies, “It will never happen.” But the love story doesn’t end there.   

If Three Floors had “betrayed” the original text by erasing its Israeli setting, here Moretti manages to capture relationships, characters and, in certain cases, the writer’s evocations of desire in its myriad forms, to tell of a passion that swings from the joyful to the melancholic.

It Will Happen Tonight was produced by Fandango and Sacher Film together with Rai Cinema, in co-production with Pan Cinéma and Playtime, with France 3 Cinéma, BTeam Prods, Irusoin and IWHT Film AIE also on board. Playtime is handling its international sales.

(Translated from Italian)

Photogallery 05/09/2026: Venice 2026 - It Will Happen Tonight

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Nanni Moretti, Louis Garrel, Jasmine Trinca, Hippolyte Girardot, Angela Finocchiaro
© 2026 Isabeau de Gennaro for Cineuropa @iisadege