There are directors who return to Venice with a film. Then there are directors who return carrying an entire mythology on their shoulders.

When Nanni Moretti stepped back into the Mostra after thirty-seven years, the feeling around Maybe Tonight (Succederà questa notte) was inevitably larger than the film itself.

It was a little cinematic time machine disguised as a love story. A return to the Lido after the long shadow of Palombella Rossa. But what makes the evening so unexpectedly moving is that Moretti does not seem interested in looking backwards. He turns his camera toward the most fragile and irrational territory of all: desire.

Maybe Tonight is Nanni Moretti in romantic mode. But this is not the kind of romance that arrives wrapped in certainty and orchestral violins. It is the infinitely more complicated kind. The kind built from hesitation, missed opportunities, wrong timing and the terrible suspicion that perhaps the person you are waiting for has always been standing just a few steps away.

Inspired freely by Eshkol Nevo’s Legami, the film gathers different relationships, characters and emotional fragments from the Israeli writer’s stories. Moretti folds them into a single narrative architecture. The result is unmistakably his. People circle around what they feel because saying it aloud would make it real.

The central idea is almost brutally simple: two people keep meeting at the wrong moment. Nanni Moretti understands that an entire universe can hide inside those four words. Timing becomes destiny. Or at least the thing we like to call destiny when we are too frightened to admit that we have sometimes created our own missed chances.

Louis Garrel and Jasmine Trinca inhabit that emotional territory with beautiful restraint. Their attraction feels less like a sudden explosion than a low electrical current. It refuses to disappear. They look at each other as though they already know that their story has begun. Neither is ready to admit it. Around them, Moretti builds a small constellation of lives, encounters and private disappointments.

Hippolyte Girardot, Angela Finocchiaro, Melina Åkerman, Elena Lietti, Andrea Lattanzi and Antonio De Matteo add different shades to a film obsessed with the strange ways people remain connected, even when they are not together. This is where the title becomes more beautiful than it first appears.

Maybe Tonight is not simply a promise that something will happen tonight. It is an act of faith. Almost a superstition. The kind of sentence people repeat when they need to believe that waiting still has meaning.

Nanni Moretti has spoken about the film as a story about feelings. More importantly, it is about the need to name them. To stop hiding behind irony, hesitation or social convention. To finally admit what is happening inside us. That idea gives the film a surprisingly contemporary tenderness. We live in an age in which people can communicate constantly and still struggle to say the one thing that matters.

The director’s characters are surrounded by language. Yet they remain emotionally tongue-tied. They are trapped in the enormous distance between feeling something and allowing another person to know that you feel it. This may be the most unexpected evolution in Moretti’s cinema. Especially for those who have followed the political and intellectual urgency of his earlier work.

Alberto Barbera , Venice Festival director, described the film as an intimate melodrama. He also emphasized its romantic nature. There is no obvious political dimension here. And there is something almost liberating about watching Moretti surrender to the apparently simple question of whether two people can finally allow themselves to love each other.

The answer, naturally, is not simple at all. Nanni Moretti has always understood that comedy and melancholy are neighbours. Here, they live under the same roof. Sometimes they share the same scene. Sometimes they appear in the same glance. There are moments when the film feels light. Almost buoyant. Then a sentence or a silence opens a small trapdoor beneath the characters. Suddenly we see years of loneliness. Family complications. Adult children. Previous relationships. All the emotional debris people carry into the possibility of a new beginning. This is not young love. And that matters. It is love after life has already happened. After people have accumulated enough experience to know how badly things can hurt.

There is something deeply sensual about the film’s restraint. Moretti is not interested in the spectacle of falling in love. He is interested in the strange physical awareness that accompanies it. Waiting for a message. The possibility of a meeting. The hesitation before entering a room. The question of whether tonight might finally be the night.

Francesco Di Giacomo’s cinematography gives these emotional uncertainties a clean, luminous surface. Alberto Iglesias’ music adds another layer of romantic unease. Beneath the everyday lives of these characters, there is always another film trying to begin. Another possibility waiting for its cue. Moretti even places himself within the story, but only in a limited presence. He allows Garrel to carry the central alter ego instead. It makes the film feel less like autobiography. More like a reflection of the director’s familiar emotional universe seen through another face. Garrel is particularly good at inhabiting that space between confidence and vulnerability. Trinca gives her character an intelligence that makes every hesitation feel meaningful. Together, they create a relationship whose greatest obstacle is not the absence of love. It is everything surrounding it: family, history, timing, fear, pride, responsibility. The ordinary architecture of adult life. This is where Maybe Tonight becomes more than a romantic comedy or melodrama. It becomes a film about possibility itself.

Nanni Moretti has spoken about what attracted him to Nevo’s stories: their precision in describing relationships, the depth of their emotions, and their sensitivity to time and missed occasions. You can feel that fascination everywhere in the film. Time is not simply something that passes. It is something the characters negotiate with. Something they resist. Something they fear. Sometimes, something they try to defeat.

Every relationship contains a clock. Every clock eventually reaches a moment when something must either happen or disappear. Perhaps that is why the film feels particularly at home in Venice. This is a city where time seems to behave differently. Yesterday and tomorrow can appear reflected simultaneously in the same black water. Moretti’s cinema has always had an instinct for the emotional comedy hidden inside everyday life. Here, however, he seems less interested in diagnosing society. He wants to listen to the small, embarrassing, beautiful noises of the heart.

A person wants to say “I love you” and does not know how. Another person waits to hear it. Someone realizes too late that an opportunity has passed. A parent discovers that their adult child has become a stranger. A friendship survives long after the people inside it have changed. These fragments accumulate. Slowly, the film becomes a mosaic of people waiting for permission to live the emotional lives they actually want. There is something almost radical about that simplicity in contemporary cinema.

Love stories are often required to justify themselves through trauma, spectacle or irony. Nanni Moretti does something much braver. He takes feelings seriously. He allows longing to be longing. He allows sentimentality without apologizing for it. He allows people to be ridiculous because desire has always made intelligent people ridiculous. He allows hope to survive because, without hope, there would be no reason to wait. Perhaps that is why the title changes meaning as the story unfolds.

At first, “maybe tonight” sounds like optimism. Then it sounds like self-deception. Then it becomes a desperate little mantra. Finally, it becomes something more beautiful: a decision to remain open to possibility. After thirty-seven years away from the competition, Nanni Moretti has returned to Venice not with a manifesto; not with an ideological battle cry: he returns with something much more vulnerable. A film that asks whether, after all the disappointments, missed trains and badly chosen moments, we can still believe that love might arrive when we least expect it. The answer is not delivered with the certainty of a fairy tale. Moretti is too experienced a filmmaker for that. Instead, he leaves the possibility hanging in the air. Fragile. Intoxicating. Exactly where the best love stories should leave it.

And as the lights come up after the screening, there is something wonderfully old-fashioned about the feeling that remains. Not the certainty that everything will work out. Just the possibility that it might. Perhaps tonight. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps after years of waiting. Perhaps love does not arrive when we are ready for it. Perhaps that is precisely why we keep looking for it.

Maybe Tonight understands that the most romantic sentence is not “I love you”. It is “I am still here”. Still waiting. Still hoping. Still willing to believe that the story has not ended yet. And somewhere beyond the lights of the Lido, with Venice reflected in the dark water and the night beginning to close around the festival, Moretti leaves us with the oldest cinematic promise of them all: maybe, finally, something is about to happen.