If in 2026 there is a hot property of the mainstream romantic comedy, it is Will Gluck. With 220 million overall intake its All except you was sleeper hit of 2023, and expectations for follow-up continued to mount. One Night Only is a long-awaited, hypato and contested film; it arrives today, August 27, in Italian theatres: but will all this dust go?
One night only: tutto in una notte
In a future that looks a lot like our present, extramarital sex has been made a criminal act. This ban is absolute and ineludible, except for a single night a year: 12 hours in which everything is allowed. Pizzaiolo Owen wants to use his Night to ask his fiancée Malika to marry him. Allie, a single singer for several years, is instead willing to go out with friends hunting a true blue prince. >The plans of both end up in the air immediately when Malika reveals to Owen that he needs the apartment they share to meet someone else and Allie is discharged by friends. But there is no time to lose heart: the clock runs and the two cannot accept to pass the Night alone. And if at their random encounter chemistry is scarce, the fate seems determined to make them continue to meet in the course of their misadventures..
High concept coi buchi
Clearly this film was born when in some room someone, after a brainstorming particularly pindaric and perhaps chemically adiuvato, came out with a key idea: “And if there were like [Smooth clouds] The night of judgment but for sex? ”.
The development of the concept has not gone far beyond this, which obviously gives you to think. We live at a delicate historical and cultural moment, in which a theme we believed “resolved” as freedom and self-determinationhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaILT 0ke-0ne sexual are being questioned by political and social institutions that should have little to share with our private sphere, and in many parts of the world (United States at risk) even reproductive freedom. A film that decides to talk about an authoritarian government that intervenes forcibly in the sexual sphere of people by jumping to equal all these criticalities can be disturbing. And yet..
A quali termini
In this period of semantic flattening, there is a fundamental principle to which we must commit ourselves to remain clinging at all costs: two contrasting things can be true at the same time.
Sex is a serious thing, and attempts to regulate it a real, worrying phenomenon and to discuss. But sex is also an extremely stupid thing, which puts us in front of the short circuits between our civilized cerebral cortex and our most instinctive sides, which little cares about the cultural structures on which we base our daily.
And neither of these two faces, the serious and ridiculous, ceases to exist when we look at the other.
At the preview, when we were all unaware of the public speech on the film and the Platform Previously Note As Twitter still had not put on us his clutches, the room laughed loudly. Because One Night Only is an incredibly stupid film, but also sparkling and more charismatic than expected if you decide to try it on your terms instead of ours. And maybe it would be worth trying to see it even just to do this exercise.
Il cast
Monica Barbaro is Allie, a perennially single singer who wants to make the most of the Night; Callum Turner is Owen, a young pizza maker who is planning to ask her to marry him. Molly Ringwald plays Linda, Owen’s independent mother, while LeVar Burton is her partner rick Rick. In the film also Maya Hawke as Owen Malika’s fiancée, Julia Fox in the fascinating bartender Skye and Charlie Gillespie as the alternative idol Ezra Stone. Complete the cast a rich kaleidoscope of cameos and small roles, from Bobby Cannavale and Pete Davidson to Ziwe, Este Haim and Flavor Flav.
L’articolo One Night Only: in defense* of stupid films — The review comes from Dituttounpop.it.
