The Summer Before Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr. Fell in Love in Venice

There's a particular kind of romantic comedy that Hollywood mostly stopped making after the 1990s — the kind where the plot barely matters because you're really just watching two people fall in love against beautiful scenery, one gondola ride at a time. Only You is one of the last of that breed, and it arrived in theaters on October 7, 1994, carrying almost no weight of expectation at all.

It had already had its true premiere weeks earlier, quietly, at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 15, 1994 — fitting, since Toronto was director Norman Jewison's own hometown turf. There was no fanfare built into that screening. Critics simply filed in, watched, and filed out to write their notices for a film that nobody was predicting would become a phenomenon. By the time it opened wide three weeks later, the reviews had already set the tone: not a triumph, but a pleasure. Roger Ebert, writing the week of release, called it the kind of lighthearted romance that felt like an endangered species even then — total fantasy, unconcerned with common sense, built entirely on the idea that its two leads were, in his words, good enough kissers to carry a movie set in Venice, Rome, and the cliffside town of Positano. He reached back for comparison not to anything recent, but to Katharine Hepburn in Summertime, to Roman Holiday, to Rossano Brazzi tossing a coin into a fountain — movies that were already old-fashioned when Jewison was a young man.

That's the frame worth sitting inside for a moment: in the fall of 1994, a studio was still willing to bankroll a movie that looked backward on purpose, that asked its Gen-X-adjacent leads to play at 1950s innocence with a straight face. Marisa Tomei, fresh off her Oscar win for My Cousin Vinny, played Faith Corvatch, a woman who has spent her whole life chasing a name a Ouija board gave her as a child. Robert Downey Jr. — two years before his career would nearly derail entirely, two decades before Tony Stark — played the man who may or may not be that destiny.

Downey has talked since about how strange the whole undertaking felt to him even while he was living it. Looking back on the production years later, he recalled that it was the best-paid work he'd done up to that point in his career — six weeks of shooting for what was, at the time, the largest paycheck of his life. But what stuck with him wasn't the money. It was the peculiar alchemy of the production itself: a script built quite literally around the rights to a batch of vintage love songs, engineered so the soundtrack could be wrung dry before the runtime was up. He remembered, too, that the film had originally been titled Faith, after Tomei's character — a small detail, but one that tells you something about what the movie thought it was actually about. Not a scavenger hunt for a man named Damon Bradley. A study of a woman who has organized her entire adult life around belief.

That's what the Ouija board scene at the start of the film is really doing, underneath the gimmick of it. An eleven-year-old asks a board game for the name of her soulmate, gets an answer, and spends the next fifteen years treating it as scripture. It's a ridiculous premise on paper. But it lets Tomei play something more interesting than a typical rom-com lead — a grown woman who abandons her wedding ten days out because a stranger's voice on the phone matches a name she memorized as a child. The film needs you to find that charming rather than alarming, and for ninety minutes in a theater in the fall of 1994, mostly, audiences did.

The Italy of it all wasn't incidental, either. Jewison and cinematographer Sven Nykvist — yes, Bergman's Nykvist — shot on location across Venice, Rome, San Gimignano, and that stretch of the Amalfi coast, chasing the same golden, sun-drenched postcard Italy that had lured American film crews there for forty years. Bonnie Hunt, playing Faith's sharp-tongued sister-in-law Kate, walked away with some of the best notices in the film, praised in period reviews for delivering lines that sounded ad-libbed even when they weren't — a very specific kind of comic performance that only works when an actor knows exactly how far she can push a scene before it breaks. It's the kind of role people forget when they think back on the film, and it's the one contemporary critics singled out most.

None of this made Only You a hit in any real sense — it closed its run with just over $20 million domestically, a modest number even by 1994 standards. But that was never really the point of a movie like this, and audiences who found it weren't measuring it by box office anyway. They were measuring it by whether they believed, for those ninety-odd minutes, that a phone call could be destiny, and that two people who'd never met could recognize each other on a bridge in Rome at night.

Watch it now and it plays almost like a time capsule twice over — once for the Technicolor postcard of Venice it was chasing even in 1994, and once for the two young stars who had no idea yet what they'd become. Somewhere in Positano, in a scene nobody was treating as historic at the time, Robert Downey Jr. and Marisa Tomei are just two actors on a six-week Italian shoot, arguing about whether a name can be a destiny. It's easy to forget, watching it now, that nobody in that frame knew what was coming next for either of them. That's the particular pleasure of finding this one again — not nostalgia for a blockbuster, but nostalgia for the last era when a studio would still let a director try to be sincere about a coin toss in a fountain.