One Night Only
Sexy romcom meets sci-fi cautionary tale in this fizzy flick about a couple having repeated meet-cutes on the one night of the year the government allows single people to have sex.
I just couldn’t get past the premise.
Every movie requires a certain amount of suspension of disbelief, and will jump through all sorts of hoops to get you to swallow the idea that gods with magic hammers walk (well, sometimes fly) among us or that Greeks take 10 years to sail 600 miles. At some point as an audience member, you’ve got to just get over it and get on with it.
“One Night Only” is a fizzy romcom about a couple who have a series of meet-cutes all over New York City during the course of one night. Pretty standard cinematic stuff. And it stars a comely pair, Monica Barbaro (so good as Joan Baez in “A Complete Unknown”) and Brit heartthrob (and potential next Mr. Bond) Callum Turner (“The Boys in the Boat”), who beam and mug for the camera heroically on the way to the inevitable.
The twist it that they’re living in an alternate reality where sex between non-married people has been restricted to one night a year. The movie doesn’t dig too deeply into the political angle, but suffice to say that three years ago a bunch of reactionary right-wingers got elected and passed these laws in order to reduce teen pregnancy, STDs, abortions and such.
(And were wildly successful at achieving those goals, the movie lets slip, at the cost of dropping our civil liberties into a deep, dark hole.)
Everyone is forced to have a little wrist tattoo/computer chip — green for married people, red for singles. If their dopamine levels spike in a way that’s associated with sex, it sends an alert and the authorities come to arrest you. But the fundamentalists recognize that in order to stave off total rebellion, they’ve got to have a release valve for all that pent-up sexual energy. Hence the once-annual holiday, in which everybody’s sex signal turns green from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.
Basically, it’s the same premise as “The Purge,” but for boinking.
Honestly, having a murder night is more believable than one for sex. If the government tried to outlaw premarital sex, we’d have an actual civil war — and not the rhetorical kind. I know our political discourse is broken right now, but the idea that politicians could pass such laws or that the courts would endorse them is next-level ludicrous.
Not to mention, what’s to stop everyone from just getting into sham marriages? The green booty-call thingamajigs just know that you’re married, not who you’re having sex with — so two people could just get hitched but still hook up with anybody that want.
Silly, silly…
Directed by Will Gluck (“Anyone But You”) from a screenplay by Travis Braun, “One Night” is at its best when it focuses on the travails and triumphs of our star couple. Owen (Turner) runs his own uptown pizzeria, and is in a committed relationship with his girlfriend (Maya Hawke). But she announces right before the bell sounds that she’s bored and wants to use this rare opportunity to experiment with someone else — and encourages him to do the same.
Allie (Barbaro) is a singer who only records for commercial work — as the story opens, she’s belting the hell out of a tune that’s for medication to treat psoriasis. (Try rhyming that, tunesmiths.) She’s super talented (and Barbara, as when she played Baez, shows she’s got seriously good pipes) but is afraid to sing in front of a live audience. The moment she says this, we know she will eventually have to perform for a crowd by the end of the movie.
Both looking out of luck on sex night, they literally bump into each other — and then Owen does something that will immediately and potentially permanently turn her off from him. But then they run into each other again, and again, and eventually they decide fate is trying to tell them something.
Each get close several times with other prospects — including Julia Fox, Quintessa Swindell and Ella Loudon — that will fall through for one reason or another. There’s a long, funny sequence where Allie and Owen compete with each other to buy seemingly the last remaining condom available in the Big Apple. (Price gouging is a big thing.) Molly Ringwald and LeVar Burton turn up as Owen’s mom and her boyfriend, looking to have their own night of celebration.
“One Night Only” is just deeply OK. If you dumped the loopy stuff about sex night and just found another reason for these two people to keep running into each other, you would have a more conventional but probably more successful romcom.
I will say it sticks the landing, with an ending kinda/sorta inspired by “Sleepless in Seattle,” but with its own peculiar twist. If this movie’s a big success, its legacy could be turning a tiny New York landmark into a big one — a form of procreation, if you will.