The Coming (and Not Coming) of the Sex-Recession Movie
On the night of the reprieve, Owen, cut loose for the evening by his girlfriend, who wants to canoodle with a neighbor, vomits in the vicinity of Allie’s high heels, in what might be called a meet-boot. They part, then meet again, and so on and so forth. High jinks ensue. There is a tussle over what seems to be the last remaining condom in the five boroughs. (One of the movie’s better jokes is that, on sex night, there is a surcharge on everything from wine to rubbers.) Owen is bamboozled by a cunning opportunist, handcuffed, and robbed in his underwear. Allie is bamboozled by a sleazy musician, who serenades her with an ode to date rape. Finally, they find each other in the harsh light of morning, with eleven minutes to spare before the mandate goes back into effect. Eleven minutes? They’ll take it!
But, of course, they don’t. Though there is background groping aplenty in “One Night Only,” sex is kept totally offscreen. Gluck, when asked by Variety whether he was influenced by studies showing that the youth are squeamish about sex, replied, “The answer is 100% yes.” He went on, “The only thing is I don’t think it’s just Gen Z and Gen Alpha. I believe it’s been a societal shift from taking nudity in adult situations and putting them on your phones at home for everybody. Now it’s more of a private, intimate thing that people don’t want to see when they’re in a shared experience.”
This is a deflating comparison; one might hope that a filmmaker would be the first to distinguish between all the things that cinema can do and all the things that porn can’t. But sex is a red herring here. Rom-coms have never needed to feature explicit sex, or sex at all. Attraction is the point—the promise of fulfillment, rather than its depiction, is the reward. And, where the comedy part of the equation is concerned, sex is inevitably better when it goes wrong. Think of the ill-starred romp in “When Harry Met Sally…,” when the leads finally consummate their relationship: the look of bliss on Meg Ryan’s face, paired with the sheer horror on Billy Crystal’s. Gluck isn’t bucking a trend by letting us leave things to the imagination; he’s working in a long tradition.
More relevant than Gluck’s depiction, or non-depiction, of sex is what sex is made to signify. “One Night Only” works best when it magnifies the anhedonic grind of our evaluative, swipe-right dating culture. Allie, in particular, is disgusted by the men who treat her as functionally interchangeable with any other available, able-bodied woman. And who can blame her? Where can real connection, the spark of eros, be found? Not, sadly, in the flabby chemistry between Turner and Barbaro, two attractive and appealing actors who are peeled down to an emphatic, boiled-potato blandness, as if their characters were crowd-tested to offend the fewest possible viewers. If “One Night Only” is meant to address the problem of pleasure in our troubled political times, then it makes a very poor case for pleasure. The bizarre and grotesque outcome is that the repressiveness of the state proves to be its own reward. When Allie and Owen decide to bump their rumpy-pumpy to next year, in order to get to know each other better, there is a relief in their compliance, like exhausted toddlers who have stopped fighting bedtime.
For something completely different, consider “I Want Your Sex,” Gregg Araki’s candy-colored fantasia of male submission and female domination. Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) is a scruffy recent college graduate who stumbles into a job as an assistant to Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), an artist who dresses in a sharp-shouldered array of dominatrix-themed outfits and makes work that riffs, ridiculously, on the erotic. (The first task assigned to Elliot is to chew pieces of gum that he then affixes to a drawing of a vulva.) A week into the job, Erika summons Elliot into her office and reports that he has been making her uncomfortable by ogling her body. Elliot is horrified; stammering, he apologizes with his eyes fixed on the ground, the very picture of pudeur. Now that she has him on the back foot, Erika proposes an arrangement: they will have sex, without emotional attachment, on her schedule, according to her whims and wishes. Elliot blushingly agrees.
