Will Gluck’s latest film, One Night Only, with its “interesting” premise, initially gets you excited about whether a romantic comedy can transcend itself and say something deeper. But the inside of this carefully packaged gift box turns out to be quite empty, and the film doesn’t seem to have much to say.
One Night Only has a premise quite similar to The Purge. Premarital sex is banned in the country, but people are allowed to break the ban for just 12 hours once a year. What’s more, everyone has a biosensor on their wrist that appears red for singles and green for married people, and when this night arrives, the system permits sexual intercourse. In this bizarre order where even protection is mandatory, New York turns into a sex festival for 12 hours.
In The Purge, this idea offered internal logical consistency and a solid critique of the system. Here, it just sounds extremely absurd. You even try putting yourself in the shoes of the people who made this law for a while, and you still can’t understand its purpose. How is this law enforced? What moral or religious foundation does it rest on? Why have people obeyed it for three years? And who accepted the state monitoring people’s private lives this closely, and how? The film has no meaningful answers to any of these questions, and everyone somehow seems to have adapted to this ridiculous law.Actually, the film has good material to criticize living under a restrictive law — that is, fascism. But it has no such interest. Its only concern is dragging our characters around the city for one night and making ridiculous things happen to them.
The story begins with Owen’s girlfriend Malika wanting to be with someone else on this special night, leading him at one point to being robbed and tied to a tree, and Allie ending up at the police station; the pair’s paths cross repeatedly at different points throughout the night. In the end, that small moment when the two of them escape all the chaos, sit in Owen’s pizzeria and talk for the first time, reveals what the film actually wants to say: seeking a real romantic connection rather than one night of sexual freedom… You can’t help but wonder: Then why choose such an Orwellian dystopian premise? I think the reason lies in the fancy but empty gift-box metaphor I mentioned at the beginning: to grab people’s attention.
Yes, it grabs our attention, but the fact that the film has such a crazy premise has no meaning beyond that. In the end, what we have is an ordinary romantic comedy that simply takes place in a dystopian world. Despite having dozens of things it could criticize or say because of the subject it chose, the film just drags itself around in cheap banality.What’s even stranger is this: While watching, we ourselves want to go out into the streets and protest this absurd law, yet we see that our characters fully comply with it.
Owen and Allie don’t try to change the system, oppose this law, or question the absurdity of this order; they simply wait for the next “free night” the system offers them. Of course the film has no interest in being political. But when you create such a world and don’t allow the characters living inside this absurd system to fight against its absurdity, and instead present their adaptation to the system as a romantic ending, you inevitably ask: Is the film really criticizing this dystopian world, or is it inadvertently presenting it as an ideal society?
