# A Charming If Familiar Romance with Garrel and Trinca
Alberto Iglesias' orchestral score signals immediately what viewers are in for. "It Will Happen Tonight," the latest romantic comedy from director Paolo Sorrentino, arrives as a deliberately retro affair. The film tracks Louis Garrel and Jasmine Trinca as two people who orbit each other across decades, meeting and parting with the predictability of celestial bodies.
The premise carries romantic appeal on paper. A man and woman encounter each other at various points in their lives, their connection persisting through time and circumstance. This structure has worked before, in films that balance nostalgic aesthetics with genuine emotional stakes. "It Will Happen Tonight" pursues the former more enthusiastically than the latter.
Garrel, the French actor known for his work with Christoph Honoré and his cameo in Greta Gerwig's "Madam Web," brings his characteristic stillness to the role. Trinca, an Italian performer acclaimed for Paolo Sorrentino's earlier work, provides complementary restraint. Together they generate a pleasant chemistry, the kind that registers as pleasant but rarely transcends into something that makes the heart race or break.
The script relies on contrived reunions. Each encounter feels engineered rather than organic. A train station. A wedding. A chance encounter years later. The filmmaking competence here cannot be questioned. Sorrentino knows how to compose a frame. Iglesias knows how to underline emotion through music. But competence without surprise becomes a formula, and formulas grow stale fast in romantic cinema.
What separates the good old-fashioned romcom from the merely nostalgic is specificity. When Nora Ephron wrote romantic comedies, she grounded them in particular details about how real people live. "It Will Happen Tonight" opts instead for the romantic archetype. The lovers are types before they become characters. Their obstacles exist to keep them apart mechanically rather than through any real conflict of values or circumstance.
The film's lightness of touch, presented as a virtue by some, functions here as avoidance. There are no consequences that stick. No one makes actual sacrifices. The narrative floats along on Iglesias' melancholic strings, asking audiences to feel moved by the mere fact of long-distance connection. For audiences primed to respond to that kind of emotional shorthand, the film may work. For those demanding something more, it offers pleasant surfaces and little beneath.
Variety's assessment lands near the mark. The film occupies an uncomfortable middle ground between homage and pastiche. It wants the elegance of midcentury romance without the emotional ruthlessness those films sometimes possessed. The result feels like something designed to appeal to the Criterion crowd without actually asking anything of them.
This remains competently made entertainment. Garrel and Trinca deserve better material, and the production values throughout are handsome. But handsome and predictable do not equate to memorable. "It Will Happen Tonight" will happen, viewers will watch, and most will forget what happened by morning.