‘One Night Only’ Is a Sex Comedy Out of Step With the Zeitgeist

Will Gluck’s “One Night Only” is a dopey, spirited Manhattan rom-com that mostly happens after dark, and entirely under the cloak of an Orwellian surveillance state. The trick to enjoying this shamelessly idiotic fantasy is to simply forget the Orwellian stuff and just focus on the rom-com material and the farcical running around town that Monica Barbaro’s Allie and Callum Turner’s Owen are stuck with over the course of this 102-minute film.We know that despite their initial annoyances and distractions — like Owen suddenly throwing up on the sidewalk which isn’t exactly hilarious — that they’re going to end up together at the end. All rom-coms ensure this so to hell with the film’s bizarre government mandate about sex. Yes, Virginia…a big, bad sex mandate. It turns out Big Brother is a repressive puritanical prude. The deal is that carnal coupling can only legally happen between married couples for the most part, and that unattached singles are only permitted to have hot, hook-up sex one lousy day out of the year. Plus dudes have to wear condoms. A more sensible plan, if a theoretical government were to commit to this kind of moronic prohibition, would be to allow hot-blooded singles to have it off once a month. This at least is a semi-enforcable, semi-tolerable situation. The basic once-a-year premise presumes married couples are having great sex. In 2005 Billy Bob Thornton, recalling his brief marriage to Angelina Jolie, said that sex with a model, an actress or the sexiest person in the world “can literally be like effing the couch.” Was it Clint Eastwood who said “show me a beautiful woman and I’ll show you a man who’s tired of doing her”? Perhaps not, but it sure sounds like Clint.How does the government keep tabs on singles? All 18-and-overs have been given a super-sensor tattoo that tracks all sexual encounters, and transmits the violator’s location to the fuzz if the wrong kind of activity is going on. Masturbation is okay, however, and it’s implied that gay guys are excluded from the rules — have at it, fellas! We’re told that anti-mandate sentiment is coursing through the populace, but most seem resigned to the situation. George Orwell’s “1984” or George Lucas’s “THX-1138,” this is not.Do Allie and Owen finally hook up and do the deed at the end? Better than that — they actually decide at the finish that they’re each other’s “real thing”…great! And yet they never get naked together and actually go to town. Because romcoms are never about the sexual act but always about denial, postponement, misrread signals, farcical foolishness and anything else that will keep the lovers apart until the big finale.Not only do they not shed their clothing in close proximity but the audience never gets to savor any of Allie’s anatomical particulars — due to a contractual nudity rider that Ms. Barbaro has called “absolutely necessary.” Nor does “One Night Only” give the slightest clue as to whether Owen is hung like a horse or a cashew.But the really weird part is Allie’s proclamation that, on this special day for single people, she’s not interested in just finding somebody to fool around with. What, then, is this very pretty girl doing roaming around town in a very skimpy Alex Perry dress while the entire city is crawling with eager-beavers of every size, shape and temperament? Allie doesn’t care. She’s only interested in finding a handsome, spiritually settled, triple-A soul man who wants roughly the same from a woman. Okay. But answer me this: Allie has 364 days a year to try and find this perfect dude and get to know him on a non-sexual basis so why is she looking for Mr. Right on this of all days, the biggest, bawdiest day in New York City? It makes no sense at all — Ms. Barbaro herself has lamented the film’s “absurd premise” — and the movie is so ridiculous in this and other respects that there’s no investing in anything of an emotional, meaningful nature.While watching this weirdly surreal farce I was thinking what an odd time it is in our great American saga to make a frisky film about singles schtupping their brains out. Odd because right now “Zoomers,” born between 1997 and 2012, and younger Millennials, born between the early-1980s and 1997, are seemingly smack dab in the middle of a “sex recession” and a surging wave of celibacy.Two weeks ago the New York Times published a story titled “Gen Z-ers Are Ditching Sex — They Might Be Onto Something” with a subtitle that asked “Is celibacy cool now?” This suggests that Will Gluck, whose previous romcoms include “Easy A,” “Friends With Benefits,” and “Anyone But You” might not have his finger on the zeitgeist button. In fact it suggests that Mr. Gluck is residing on his own planet.

‘One Night Only’ Is a Sex Comedy Out of Step With the Zeitgeist

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