(courtesy IMP Awards)
Romcoms are usually fairly straightforward affairs.
Two people of any kind of gender mix meet, find themselves attracted to each other, do and say cute things, fall in love, stuff it up a little (or a lot), recover and sail off metaphorically into the sunset, hardly believing love has found them.
Boxes are ticked, narrative conventions observed, final acts enacted with sweetly expectant order; the trick always is how well this all happens with some romcoms excelling and adding something original to the genre recipe while others, many others, either sit comfortably in an unchallenging middle or fall into forgettable messiness.
It’s a rare thing indeed for any romcom to be both truly imaginatively interesting and weirdly off-putting but somehow One Night Only manages it, somehow managing to insert a warm, rich and cute romance where the leads, Allie and Owen (Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner respectively) have fantastically fizzy chemistry, into a wider story which isn’t sure if it’s setting is clever, strangely disquieting or gently subversive, or all of the above, or none of them.
Much of it lack of 10/10 appeal, for it is a long way from this storied score, comes from its setting.
One Night Only is set in a MAGA-America, which is hardly a stretch to imagine, in which premarital sex is illegal except for one night of the year (hence, the title) in which people can go at it like rabbits without any fear of legal recrimination.
The policing of this bizarre edict, which is delivered in one segment like the most reasonable thing on Earth, falls not only to actual police who act like oddly reluctant yet zealously focused religious enforcers who could find a job with the Iranian regime should their current employment fail them, but to inserted chips which glow red for most of the year except for the magical Purge-like night when they go green and the weird commodification of unmarried sex goes wild.
While there are murmurs throughout the film about the inherent immorality of a regime meant to enforce someone’s twisted idea of sexual morality, with “F**k the mandate” scrawled on walls and uttered with performative emphasis by musicians like Ezra Stone (Charlie Gillespie) during concerts, no one seems truly bothered by what is essentially an Orwellian intrusion into peoples’ lives.
How are there not mass protests? Surely the night should be given over to huge demonstrations and protests writ large? Even if the single people are so horny, they want to have sex and not protest, surely the married folk could do it for them?
But no, what we get are a few “Oh this is a shit thing” while stores promote specials like its Christmas or Valentine’s Day, people dress up like it’s big event and capitalism races on giving no care about the autocratic menace lurking behind and all through a law which is, however you slice it, the mother of all intrusive laws.
One Night Only though seems content to happily use it as an unusual context and nothing more with writer Travis Braun and director Will Gluck barely causing waves about something that demonstrably should be part of the beating heart and substantive soul of the film.
Sure, it’s a romcom and we’re here for love – this is brilliantly done and near flawlessly executed; more on that later – but surely some big questions, and maybe even some actual real world subversion could have been thrown into the mix too with Owen and Allie using their connection of real love on a night of carnal pleasure as some sort of raging against the machine?
What we get inside instead is a weird acceptance of a wholly unacceptable and morally barbaric situation, and while you could argue it’s just a romcom, chill out already dude, One Night Only itself makes a HUGE deal of its setting and how it is all pervasive and all-encompassing and very much part of the social fabric, despite only being a relatively recent law.
No one seems bothered beyond the graffiti and the concert proclamations, and you spend much of the film not concentrating on the quite sweet and lovely romance taking place before you, and good lord Barbaro and Turner are near-perfect in their respective roles, but how all these people, single and otherwise, old and young seem to have just rolled and played dead when the government overreached morally to a fantastically unwarranted degree.
Leaving the thematic dissonance aside, and it’s so loud it’s hard to really hear anything else in the film, One Night Only does do one thing really, really beautifully.
It’s a JOY and a DELIGHT watching Allie and Owen meet-cute badly, then meet-cute well, then fall part, come together over and over again in one long chaotic night before realising that they are each the person they were meant to find.
Owen’s a guy jilted on the night by his long-term lacklustre girlfriend Malika (Maya Hawke), and while he’s hurt, it’s clear their relationship is on super shaky ground when she wants to sleep with their neighbour and then she doesn’t and WTF lady, and so what’s really lost, anyway; meanwhile, lovelorn Allie is left all alone on the night by her super horny friend Jacinta (King Princess who finds “love” with Tajen (Okieriete Onaodowan) in the line to the toilets at the first bar the two supposedly close friends walk into.
They are clearly ready for love and not lust, and One Night Only does a really affectingly romantic job of slowly but surely bringing them together in scenes that burst with chemistry and underline with every word, facial expression and charmingly shared experience that here are two people defying the ethos of the night whether they mean to or not.
It’s such a pleasure to watch and to be a part of and the way One Night Only finishes up with a heartfelt declaration of love, true love in the most thoughtful and meaningful of ways makes the finish of the film something genuinely real and affecting.
It’s a pity that this deftly executed love story sits inside a movie so misshapen, morally and narratively, that you walk out of the cinema buoyed by Owen and Allie’s love but icked to the hilt by the casual way in which autocracy is accepted and society allows itself to be molded in such a way that no one tries to fight back.
Love is great and all that, and Owen and Allie’s is a gem, but in a world like that? Ugh no thank you, not now, not ever, no matter how brightly and buoyantly Cupid does a thing which all of the sins of One Night Only aside, he does superbly well indeed.