The surprise of Nanni Moretti’s return to competition is not that he made a love story. It is the instrument he chose to play it. For a film that abandons his old reflexes — the political irony, the essayistic detours, the director talking back to his own frame — Moretti built the whole thing around Louis Garrel, an actor whose entire romantic vocabulary has been the opposite of straightforward feeling. The result is Moretti’s most unguarded picture, and the argument you are watching is really an argument about how much sincerity one face can carry.

Garrel arrives carrying a lineage. Son of Philippe Garrel, raised inside the afterlife of the New Wave, he became Christophe Honoré’s romantic muse, the man who sang his heartbreak in films where love was always being analyzed, quoted, held at a slight ironic distance. That distance is his signature. Moretti asks him to drop it. Here he plays Matteo without a protective layer of self-awareness, a man permitted to want something plainly, and the demand visibly costs him — which is precisely the point.

The film tracks Matteo and Greta, played by Jasmine Trinca, across the years in a sequence of near-misses: two people who meet at the wrong times, keep choosing other lives, and circle back to the same unfinished question. Moretti adapts the Israeli novelist Eshkol Nevo — the same writer he filmed in Three Floors — and again works the lever of time, the idea that a decision only changes a life when it finally arrives at the right moment. For a director who spent a career distrusting sentiment, this is a startling surrender to it.

Moretti staged that surrender on set, too, and Garrel turned it into the festival’s best anecdote. Describing what he called the “Moretti method,” he recounted a scene that required a basketball shot: the director demonstrated it himself, sank it on the first take with the cameras rolling, and told his star, “This is what I want you to do.” Garrel then missed, take after take. It reads as comedy, but it is the film in miniature — an auteur-actor handing his own grammar to another author. Trinca framed the same submission as devotion: “Nanni is the person who forged my idea of cinema,” she said, “which is not about being in front of camera with an affectation or a pose.”

Whether the surrender pays off is exactly where the reviews break apart, and the split is more coherent than it looks. Il Fatto Quotidiano called the film “stripped, vital, naked, painfully fragile,” a late-career opening of the veins comparable to Caro diario. IONCINEMA’s Nicholas Bell saw “rosy-tinted claptrap from a bygone era,” and read Garrel’s performance as manic, a departure from the delicate scenarios Honoré once wrote for him, with Greta flattened into a tortured object of desire. Both are describing the same thing. The film asks you to accept Garrel playing love with the irony switched off; you either follow him into that or you flinch.

Moretti still reads the world through form, and the form is doing the arguing. A tennis rally carries a Truffaut echo; a needle-drop to the Rolling Stones and a kiss divided by a car window are the beats even the skeptics concede land. When the montage turns to a chorus of comic minor characters the picture thins toward the schematic, the machinery of a romance built to reunite its leads on schedule. But the current runs through the two bodies at its center, and Moretti trusts them with a directness he once reserved for his own on-screen alter ego.

It is his first film in the Venice competition since Palombella rossa, thirty-seven years of distance folded into a story about people who wait too long to act. The wager is Garrel: hand a connoisseur of romantic irony a role that forbids it, and either the mask cracks into something true or the whole thing curdles into nostalgia. Venice, loudly, could not agree which — and that disagreement is the surest sign Moretti got a rise out of a register he had spent a lifetime avoiding.

Tags: Venice Film Festival, Louis Garrel, Nanni Moretti, film reviews, It Will Happen Tonight, Jasmine Trinca