After more than three decades as a major Hollywood player, Norman Jewison has presided over more romantic parings than Aunti Mame. So it's high praise indeed when the Canadian directing legend pronounces Marisa Tomei and Robert Downey Jr. to be "a couple with wonderful chemistry, of a kind I haven't seen since I had Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen in the Thomas Crown Affair." That's a romantic landscape that runs from The Cincinatti Kid to Moonstruck, so let's just call it an informed opinion.

In Jewison's romantic comedy Only You - the closing gala feature at this year's Toronto Film Festival - Tomei and Downey play a couple whose love is, as they say, written in the stars. Unaware of each other's existence, the two are separated by an ocean but connected by a Ouija board. Or are they?

At age 11, Faith (Tomei) is told by a Ouija board that her intended's name is D-A-M-O-N-B-R-A-D-L-E-Y. Spookily, at age 14, a Gypsy fortune teller also picks that name out of a hat as that of the man-in-her-life-to-be. The name remains burned in her consciousness, but after some years of waiting, she decides to settle for an adoring Pittsburgh podiatrist, who's unfortunately not named Damon. On the eve of her wedding, however, she receives a congratulary call from an old friend of her fiancé - one Damon Bradley. Damon, it seems, is on his way to Italy. And so too, after she picks herself up from the floor, is the suddenly obsessed Faith. In Italy, confusion sets in. Faith meets a lovestruck shoe salesman named Peter Right (Downey), who passes himself off as Damon. They seem perfectly matched, until she learns of the deception and vows eternal hatred over the betrayal.

"He's Mr. Right, but he's not Damon," Jewison told Premiere magazine. Comparing Only You to his best-known romance, he says "Moonstruck was more classically constructed, like a theatrical play. This is a little bit of a mystery - it has many curves, turns and twists. It's also pleasant, happy and joyful." (It's worth noting that Only You is set against the classic scenery of Rome, Milan and Tuscany, which would add fuel to any film romance.)

Jewison is particularly taken with Downey, who was nominated for an Oscar last March for his role in Chaplin. In Downey, the director claims to hear echoes of two other comic-romantics of yore - Cary Grant and Tony Curtis - "in the way he just seduces the audience," he said at the Toronto Festival launch.

For her part, the Oscar-winning firebrand Tomei characterizes Faith's story as one that could only happen in the movies. What would she really do if a fortune teller told her she should marry Robert Downey Jr.? "Well, darling," she told Movieline, "first, I wouldn't stake everything on a fortune teller. I mean REALLY. "But I would have to follow my heart. Ultimately (Faith) does that too. I would do what my character would do in the sense of following my heart. Going for it, totally. I try to follow my passion. I haven't fallen in love a lot of times. Three times. But that's what I liked about the movie. It's very, very romantic, which can just be a glorious, heart soaring kind of thing."