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One Night Only--Based only on the title and the poster, audiences may not go in expecting dystopian sci-fi. I didn't. But the premise of this romantic comedy is, quite exactly, The Purge, except with sex instead of violence.
Up front we are told that three years before the movie started, "The Mandate" outlawed premarital sex in America except for a single 12-hour period in summer. There's some amusingly interwoven exposition to explain how this is enforced, and some clever background gags in the signage or on TV, but the plausibility or implications of this liebesverbot aren't the point.
The movie is really about our heroine Allie (Monica Barbaro) and our hero Owen (Callum Turner) getting together and realizing they're meant for each other before the time is up. He's a pizza chef; she's a singer who makes her living with embarrassing jingles for pharmaceutical commercials but can't bring herself to deploy her pipes onstage in front an audience.
Dateless on the big day, they wander the lust-saturated streets of New York, crossing and re-crossing each other's paths while chasing after false leads and suffering wacky humiliations. Directed by Will Gluck of Easy A from a script by Travis Braun, One Night Only starts off excellently, with ingenious set-ups and a nice big ensemble of character players--Maya Hawke, Molly Ringwald and Levar Burton, to name only three--along with some surprise cameos.
The movie gets messier and less assured in its overextended third act, as if Gluck and Braun felt obligated to pile on unnecessary complications. By the end, the night feels way too long. But a movie like this fails or succeeds on the degree to which we like the leads and want to see them find each other. Turner and Barbaro's relationship progresses to the next station of fond, amused familiarity each time they meet, so that even when they're presented with glamorous alternatives, it's believable that they would opt for each other.
Turner is winning in his nice guy role; he has a touch of Channing Tatum's sweetness while giving off a sharper sense of intelligence. But One Night Only truly serves as a showcase for Barbaro, the striking young actress who played Joan Baez in No Direction Home. Maintaining her dignity here in a precariously revealing dress, with smiles and quiet chuckles escaping onto her face despite the travails she's facing, she gives us a romantic heroine we can wholeheartedly root for.
