Cinema
One-Night Stand (18, selected cinemas)
Too neat
Mark Steyn
During sex, Mimi likes to bark out instructions — 'Almost, almost. Circle, cir- cle! Slower, gentle. Harder, harder! — leav- ing her husband twitching nervously like a man playing a sudden-death video game with a wonky joystick. Not many of us would fancy that sort of thing — except maybe during the monthly Driving Instruc- tor night at the local masochists' club — so Mike Figgis has no problem setting up shallow, self-centred Mimi as an object of derision.
For One-Night Stand, Figgis serves as writ- er, director, co-producer and composer and the trouble is that, in that last capacity, his approach to the drama is much the same as Mimi's to sex. The gist of every new scene is telegraphed by some ludicrous mood change in the incidental score, lurch- ing as it does every 12 seconds from cock- tail jazz to elevator rock to cello obliggato: slower, gentle; harder, harder; pensive, wistful; hectic, frantic; nervous, guilty; empty, sterile ...
This is Figgis's first film since Leaving Las Vegas, which, for all its darkly sophisti- cated sheen, peddled all the usual (and, in my limited experience of either calling, false) clichés about drunks and hookers. But, because it was made for less than the cost of most blockbusters' underwear bud- gets, its gloomy lighting and indistinct dia- logue were mistaken for profundity and the director was hailed as the thinking movie- goer's antidote to Hollywood. Having taken leave of Las Vegas, Figgis now seems to have taken leave of his senses. Even more than its predecessor, One-Night Stand is so high on its own atmosphere that everything else goes by the wayside.
Max (Wesley Snipes), a successful direc- tor of commercials, flies from the West Coast to New York to see Charlie, his for- mer best pal, now HIV positive (Robert Downey Jnr). While in town, a string of creaky coincidences such as the most exe- crable Hollywood formula junk would eschew leads him into the presence of a vulnerable, lip-biting bottled-blonde whose locks tumble fetchingly down her face. On the rare occasions when the torrent of hair briefly lifts, the lovely face of Natassja Kin- ski can be glimpsed. Her name is Karen, and no sooner does Max espy her than a thick, sticky fluid is staining his clothes. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out where we're headed — though, in fact, Karen is a rocket scientist.
Back on the Coast, the family dog sus- pects Max's adultery. But Mimi, the afore- mentioned missus (Ming-Na Wen), is only interested in getting hers. 'Aren't you gonna wake the kids?' frets Max under her writhing torso. 'Fuck the kids, man!' she roars. 'I'm commmnammmmmming! Aaaaaagh!' Aside from sex, her main inter- ests are real estate, the new take-out place in the mall etc. Back in New York, Max discovers that the tender, sensitive, under- standing woman in whose arms he took refuge is, as luck would have it, his best friend's sister-in-law.
As stylish director and heavy-handed composer, Figgis works hard to persuade you that the above is incredibly deep — not the discards from a correspondence course in farce construction, but a powerful medi- tation on adultery. Perhaps the characters are meant to be cyphers; perhaps that's why he's cast his film like a Benetton com- mercial — black man, Chinese wife, Ger- man mistress, gayboy chum — even though there's nothing black, Chinese or German 'about them and the gayness is mostly played for background camp.
He's been making films in America for years, but, to judge from One-Night Stand, you'd think he'd just got off the boat from Britain. His view of both New York and Los Angeles is a supercilious tourist's: the former's full of knife-wielding muggers — a threat to your person; the latter's full of glamorous airheads — a threat to your soul. But these are peripheral. For all the dignity Snipes, Kinski and co. bring to their roles, One-Night Stand fails because Figgis loads the dice. When adultery's painful, it's because it isn't clear-cut: because you've met someone you love, you have to lose someone you also love. But Snipes has to choose between pain-in-the-butt Wen and hair-in-the-face Kinski: some contest. You never for a moment believe that he could ever have loved his wife.
As always with Figgis, there are memo- rable images. Ming-Na Wen's breasts, which stay covered up during the sex scene, are revealed only once — while she's sleep- ing: they sit there pointing perkily at the ceiling, while Snipes contemplates them thoughtfully. Figgis should have left it at that; instead, he has Snipes lean over and cover them with a sheet, as if he's tucking in a couple of teddy bears. Underneath its studied elliptical, allusive veneer, the whole film's like that: too neat and too contrived.
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