"Only You" stands as a beguiling footnote in the sprawling, eclectic filmography of Norman Jewison, the Canadian-born maestro whose career spanned over five decades and encompassed everything from blistering social dramas to lavish musical spectacles. Jewison, who passed away in January 2024 at the age of 97, was a director of protean talents, equally at home helming the racial powder keg of "In the Heat of the Night" (1967), with its iconic "They call me Mister Tibbs!" showdown, or the moonlit matrimonial mayhem of "Moonstruck" (1987), where Cher’s Loretta Castorini howls at the lunar pull of forbidden desire. His touch could be as tender as a jazz riff in "The Cincinnati Kid" (1965) or as unflinching as the courtroom corruptions laid bare in "And Justice for All" (1979), starring Al Pacino as a lawyer teetering on ethical oblivion. And then there were the moon-drenched romances, like "In the Moon of the Wolf" (1974, though more accurately his "Moonstruck" redux), where passion blooms under celestial scrutiny. Into this tapestry of prestige and provocation slips "Only You" (1994), a frothy romcom confection that’s as lightweight as a gondolier’s oar skimming Venetian waters—charming, utterly superfluous, and yet, in its unapologetic whimsy, a reminder of why Jewison was Hollywood’s most versatile ringmaster.

Released in the heyday of the 1990s romantic comedy boom—a decade when Nora Ephron was scripting soulful neurotics for Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, and Garry Marshall was churning out ensemble confections like "Pretty Woman" (1990)—"Only You" feels like a deliberate detour for Jewison. At 68, he could have rested on his laurels, perhaps producing another socially conscious gut-punch or a starry musical revival. Instead, he embraced the romcom’s elastic idiocy, delivering a film that’s equal parts fairy tale and farce. It’s the kind of movie that begins with a child’s Ouija board séance and ends with an airport dash straight out of Richard Curtis’s playbook, complete with applauding extras and a delayed flight for love’s sake. Today, in the post-#MeToo, intersectional lens of 2025 cinema discourse, one might (and many do) chide it for its unyielding heteronormativity—a narrative arc so laser-focused on cisgender, straight romance that it renders queer possibilities or polyamorous detours not just absent, but inconceivable. The Italian characters, too, teeter on caricature: suave lotharios with gelled hair and operatic gestures, evoking a strain of Hollywood’s eternal "la dolce vita" fetish that hasn’t aged gracefully. Yet, for all its dated presumptions, "Only You" dodges the pitfalls of outright offensiveness, thanks to Jewison’s deft hand. He refuses to polish Italy into a glossy postcard, opting instead for a lived-in authenticity that grounds the fantasy. Venice’s canals glint with everyday bustle—tourists haggling with vendors, locals nursing espressos at scarred wooden tables—while Rome’s eternal fountains serve as backdrops for pratfalls rather than posed glamour shots. The protagonists, Faith Corvatch (Marisa Tomei) and Peter Wright (Robert Downey Jr.), aren’t swanning through a travelogue; they’re thrust into a cascade of grotesque mishaps—a botched seduction in a cliffside hotel, a midnight chase through labyrinthine alleys—that turn serendipity into slapstick. And yes, the happy ending is as inevitable as Vesuvius’s shadow, but it’s earned through the film’s buoyant insistence that love, however contrived, is worth the folly.

To understand "Only You" as more than a disposable delight, one must first trace its lineage in Jewison’s oeuvre. Born in Toronto in 1926 to a family of modest means, Jewison cut his teeth in Canadian television, directing variety shows and dramatic anthologies before crossing the border in the early 1960s. His Hollywood breakthrough came with "40 Pounds of Trouble" (1963), a Doris Day vehicle that showcased his knack for blending screwball energy with heartfelt humanism. From there, he zigzagged genres with the agility of a character actor: the caper-thriller "The Thomas Crown Affair" (1968), pitting Steve McQueen against Faye Dunaway in a chessboard duel of wits; the anti-war lament "The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming" (1966), a satirical plea for Cold War détente; the Broadway-to-screen triumph "Fiddler on the Roof" (1971), where Topol’s Tevye wrestled God amid pogroms and parades. Jewison’s liberal sensibilities—honed by a youthful stint in the Royal Canadian Navy and a lifelong aversion to injustice—infused his work with moral urgency. "In the Heat of the Night," for instance, wasn’t just a procedural; it was a Molotov cocktail hurled at Southern racism, with Sidney Poitier’s Virgil Tibbs emerging as a symbol of quiet, unyielding dignity. "Rollerball" (1975) dystopically skewered corporate fascism through James Caan’s gladiatorial rage. Even his musicals pulsed with politics: "Jesus Christ Superstar" (1973) relocated the Passion to a sun-baked desert, stripping away stained-glass reverence for raw, rock-operatic immediacy.

By the 1980s, Jewison had mellowed into a sage romanticist. "Moonstruck," his crown jewel, transformed Cher’s Oscar-winning turn into a paean to impulsive desire, set against New York’s Little Italy where family feuds simmer like Sunday sauce. It was here that Jewison honed the romcom alchemy that would flavor "Only You": a willingness to let characters behave like glorious idiots, defying logic for the sake of lunacy, all while rooting the chaos in cultural specificity. "Only You" echoes "Moonstruck" in its Italian-American heritage (Faith’s Pittsburgh roots nod to the Castorinis' Brooklyn), its lunar motifs (full moons bookend key confessions), and its faith in fate as a mischievous matchmaker. But where "Moonstruck" crackles with ensemble vitriol—Olympia Dukakis’s Rose snarling, "Your life is not built with hands, you don’t keep it up with cobwebs" — "Only You" pares down to a duo dynamic, amplifying the isolation of romantic pursuit. It’s slighter, yes, but in its slimness lies a purity: Jewison, late in his career, indulging the genre’s escapist core without the baggage of message-making. As he told interviewers around the time, "After all the heavy stuff, sometimes you just want to make people smile." In a filmography dotted with Oscars (three for producing, nominations galore), "Only You" is the cotton candy—sweet, fleeting, and all the more precious for it.

The plot of "Only You" unfolds like a Rube Goldberg machine designed by Cupid: elaborate, improbable, and engineered for maximum heart-flutter. We open in 1970s Pittsburgh, where 11-year-old Faith (Tammy Minoff, wide-eyed and winsome) huddles with her cousin Kate (Jessica Hertel) around a Ouija board. The planchette spells out her future husband’s name: Damon Bradley. Giggling, they dismiss it as childish divination, but fate—or something like it—has other plans. Cut to a carnival midway, where a turbaned fortune-teller (Antonia Rey, all enigmatic gravitas) draws Faith’s palm and intones the same name, sealing the prophecy with a wink. Fast-forward fourteen years: adult Faith (Marisa Tomei, fresh off her "My Cousin Vinny" Oscar glow) is a prim Catholic schoolteacher, her life a model of Midwestern rectitude. She’s ten days from marrying Dwayne (John Benjamin Hickey), a bland podiatrist whose idea of romance is color-coded sock drawers. Faith’s days are a rhythm of chalk dust and catechism, her nights haunted by the ghost of "Damon Bradley," a talisman of untapped passion she’s long since shelved.

Enter the catalyst: a phone call from Peter Wright (Robert Downey Jr.), an old high-school chum of Dwayne’s, begging off the wedding due to a sudden Venice jaunt. The name hits Faith like a thunderbolt—Damon Bradley. In a frenzy of floral disarray, she jilts Dwayne at the airport, cramming her wedding dress into a carry-on and commandeering her sister-in-law Kate (Bonnie Hunt), who’s fleeing her own marital doldrums with brother Larry (Fisher Stevens), a roofer whose affections run more to ladder puns than poetry. The women touchdown in Venice, a city of mist-shrouded spires and sighing canals, where gondolas slice through waters like black silk ribbons. Faith, in a chic black raincoat over her bridal gown (a visual pun on mourning lost certainty), scans crowds for her phantom prince. Kate, ever the sardonic sidekick, ribs her: "You’re chasing a name like it’s the Stanley Cup." Their quarry eludes them—missed trains, wrong hotels—but serendipity intervenes in Peter’s form. He’s no balding accountant but a lithe, quicksilver charmer with a grin that could melt Murano glass. Mistaking him for Damon, Faith spills her Ouija lore in a candlelit trattoria, their knees brushing under checkered cloths as Vivaldi violins weep from a nearby quartet.

What follows is a whirlwind courtship straight from the romcom gods: a moonlit gondola ride where Peter (still incognito) recites Byron amid firefly flickers; a dawn scramble up the Rialto Bridge as bells toll like wedding chimes. Tomei, with her pixie cut and perpetual blush, radiates the wide-eyed wonder of a woman rediscovering her own audacity; Downey, in pre-Iron Man impishness, layers Peter’s roguish charm with a vulnerability that hints at deeper wounds—perhaps the scars of a cynic who’s forgotten how to believe. They consummate their Venice idyll in a palazzo suite, bodies tangled in damask sheets, the camera (Sven Nykvist’s golden-hour magic) framing them against arched windows where the Adriatic laps like applause. But dawn brings disillusion: Peter confesses his true name, shattering Faith’s faith. "You lied to me!" she wails, fleeing to Rome in a taxi that rattles over cobblestones like her fracturing illusions. Kate, meanwhile, tangles with Giovanni (Joaquim de Almeida), a mustachioed importer whose courtship involves rooftop toasts to "la bella vita" and a wardrobe of silk ascots—stock Italianate suavity that borders on parody but lands as playful homage.

Rome amplifies the farce: Faith, adrift in the Eternal City, enlists Peter (who’s trailed her, smitten fool that he is) to hunt the real Damon. Their quest veers into absurdity—a wild Vespa chase through the Forum’s ruins, dodging togaed tourists; a gelato-fueled stakeout at the Trevi Fountain, where Faith’s coin toss summons not Neptune but a flock of dive-bombing pigeons. Jewison, drawing on his "Moonstruck" playbook, infuses these escapades with grotesque physicality: Faith’s heel snaps in a pothole, sending her sprawling into a fruit cart; Peter’s allergic sneezes erupt mid-serenade, scattering stray cats like confetti. It’s here that the film’s anti-postcard ethos shines—Nykvist’s lens captures Rome not as a sanitized diorama but a chaotic bazaar, where Vespas honk like geese and nonnas hawk chestnuts from dented carts. The lovers' banter crackles with Ephron-esque wit: "Destiny’s just another word for making bad decisions," Peter quips, as Faith retorts, "Says the man who faked his name for a one-night stand." Yet beneath the joshing lurks a poignant undercurrent—Faith’s terror that her life’s been a dress rehearsal for a play without a leading man.

The odyssey crescendos in Positano, the Amalfi Coast’s pastel-cliffed jewel, where the real Damon Bradley (Adam LeFevre, a smarmy everyman) materializes at the opulent Le Sirenuse hotel. But he’s no soulmate—just a leering opportunist whose advances curdle into coercion, forcing Peter to intervene in a poolside brawl that’s equal parts "Moonstruck" operatics and Keystone Kops. Revelations cascade: Larry arrives from Pittsburgh, confessing he rigged the Ouija board as a sibling prank and bribed the fortune-teller to keep the myth alive. Kate, rekindled with her husband amid Giovanni’s amorous farce, urges Faith to seize the present over the prophetic. In the film’s fevered climax, at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport, a final paging for "Damon Bradley" summons the actual man—a harried businessman who, briefed by Peter, prods Faith to her epiphany: her heart’s been Peter’s all along. She sprints gates in slow-motion glory, boarding the Boston flight as staffers stall the jetway. The cabin erupts in cheers as she collapses into Peter’s lap, their kiss a vortex of relief and rapture. Fade out on applause, the Italian sun dipping like a satisfied voyeur.

At its core, "Only You" is a valentine to serendipity, positing love not as a checklist but a cosmic crapshoot. Faith embodies the romcom archetype of the repressed romantic—her name a sly nod to blind devotion—whose journey from podiatrist’s bride to destiny’s daredevil mirrors the genre’s eternal tension between security and surrender. Tomei, 30 and at the peak of her post-Oscar versatility, imbues Faith with a fizzy authenticity: her Pittsburgh twang cuts through the Euro-glam like a Steelers cheer, her pratfalls (a la "Vinny"'s courtroom chaos) blending vulnerability with verve. Critics like Janet Maslin of The New York Times carped at her "brittle, bright-eyed delivery," deeming her too "adorable by half" for the schoolmarm role, but that’s the point—Faith’s no stoic pedagogue; she’s a powder keg of pent-up poetry, her arc a liberation from Ouija shackles to self-authored bliss. Downey, 29 and midway through his bad-boy-to-blockbuster metamorphosis (post-"Chaplin," pre-"Wonder Boys"), is the film’s secret sauce: Peter’s a shape-shifter, donning Damon’s alias like a spy’s mask, his charisma a cocktail of con artistry and genuine ache. Watch him in the gondola scene, eyes crinkling with mischief as he fibs about his "fateful" name—it’s Downey’s tragicomic gift, the rogue who yearns to be reformed. Their chemistry, as Roger Ebert raved, is "ineffable," a good-natured alchemy that sidesteps the era’s smarmy seduction tropes for something sweeter, more egalitarian.

Supporting players add ballast to the bubble: Bonnie Hunt, in her breakout film role, steals scenes as Kate, her deadpan sarcasm ("Italy? More like Itchy") masking a midlife malaise that resolves in wry reconciliation. Joaquim de Almeida’s Giovanni is the requisite Latin lover, but Jewison leavens him with self-aware flourishes—a bumbling tango lesson, a comically oversized bouquet—that poke fun at the stereotype without malice. Fisher Stevens’s Larry, all rumpled everyman, grounds the farce in familial forgiveness, his prank confession a cathartic gut-punch amid the giggles. Even bit parts shine: Siobhan Fallon’s gossipy Leslie, Phyllis Newman’s exasperated mom—Jewison populates his Italy with a chorus of colorful eccentrics, echoing the ensemble warmth of his earlier works.

Jewison’s direction, abetted by Nykvist’s painterly gaze (the cinematographer’s last Hollywood hurrah before retiring), elevates "Only You" from romcom boilerplate to visual poem. Filmed on location in Venice’s labyrinthine calli, Rome’s sun-dappled piazzi, and Positano’s vertigo-inducing vistas (with interiors shot in Chicago’s Studio City for that authentic echo of immigrant grit), the movie sidesteps the "Eat Pray Love" trap of Instagram-ready exoticism. There’s no sweeping drone shots of the Colosseum at golden hour; instead, Jewison favors intimate chaos—a stolen kiss interrupted by a Vespa’s belch, a fountain splash that soaks Tomei’s hem like accidental baptism. Editor Stephen Rivkin cuts with rhythmic verve, syncing pratfalls to Rachel Portman’s score: a lilting waltz of oboes and harps that swells like Amalfi waves, evoking the frothy strings of classic Italianate romances ("Three Coins in the Fountain," 1954) without pastiche. Milena Canonero’s costumes—Faith’s progression from starched whites to flowing linens—mirror her metamorphosis, while production designer Anne Stuhler clutter-clutters the sets with lived-in details: scuffed frescoes, overflowing ashtrays, the detritus of dolce far niente.

Thematically, "Only You" grapples with destiny’s double edge: Is love predestined, or a daily defiance of doubt? Faith’s Ouija fixation satirizes New Age woo-woo, yet the film affirms a softer fatalism—that the universe conspires for the bold. It’s a 90s artifact in its unexamined assumptions: heterosexuality as default, with nary a queer-coded glance or female friendship that eclipses romance. The Italian portrayals—Giovanni’s hand-kissing, the chorus of "bella!" exclamations—flirt with ethnic shorthand, a holdover from Hollywood’s Fellini-fied fantasies. In 2025's critical climate, these read as microaggressions, the film a symptom of pre-woke whimsy where white leads traipse through "quaint" Europe unchallenged. Yet Jewison, ever the humanist, injects nuance: His Italians aren’t props but participants, their warmth a foil to American uptightness. And the grotesquery—Faith’s wedding-dress sprint through airport security, Peter’s poolside punch-up—subverts the genre’s polish, reminding us that true love’s often a hot mess.

Comparisons to Jewison’s canon abound. Like "Moonstruck," it’s a moon-kissed paean to impulsive amore, but where Cher’s Loretta navigates family webs, Faith’s quest is solitary, her growth internal. Echoes of "Fiddler" linger in the cultural rituals—Pittsburgh’s Polish-Italian enclaves mirroring Anatevka’s shtetl bonds—while the social bite of "Heat" is absent, replaced by escapist effervescence. Reception was middling: a $20 million domestic gross (respectable for TriStar) but mixed reviews—54% on Rotten Tomatoes, Ebert’s 3.5/4 stars lauding its "endangered" charm, Maslin dubbing it "cornball." Audiences adored it (A- CinemaScore), drawn to the star wattage and escapist allure. Over time, it’s cultified on streaming, a palate-cleanser for Jewison completists mourning his 2024 exit.

In the end, "Only You" endures not despite its superfluity, but because of it—a gleaming bauble in Jewison’s treasure chest, whispering that sometimes, the best films are the ones that whisk us away without apology. In a world grown grim, who wouldn’t chase a Damon Bradley—or a Peter Wright—across sunlit seas? Faith learns that destiny isn’t spelled out on a board; it’s danced into being, one foolish step at a time. And in that, Jewison, ever the romantic, bids us join the jig.