'One Night Stand': A Bed Idea

"One Night Stand" completes a familiar arc in current film culture. A director makes a breakthrough picture, gets great reviews and suddenly can do what he wants. So he does some private, passionate dream of a movie, a cherished, loved pet of an idea. And it bites.

So here's the arc between Mike Figgis's "Leaving Las Vegas" and his new "One Night Stand": from the sublime to the ludicrous.

Quelle stinko! Arf, arf! Sic transit gloria mundi! Here yesterday, gone today! As far as stands go, Custer had better luck!

A kind of jazz free-association that's rich on music and style and empty of content, the film glibly tracks the consequences that follow from an event of the title. In this case, the one-nighter is between Max (Wesley Snipes), a high-priced California director of commercials, and Karen (Nastassja Kinski), an East Coast rocket scientist.

You laugh? Nastassja Kinski as rocket scientist strikes you as funny? Well, evidently it struck Figgis that way, so Kinski says almost nothing during the film. She mutters, she quivers, she whispers, but no words ever come out. Meanwhile her baby blues radiate the emptiness of what lies beyond Pluto. You could get lost in them, but you'd never bump into a thought.

And here's another funny thing: Figgis does a movie about an affair but he hates adultery.

What sets the ball in motion, in other words, is an absurd sequence in which these two strangers, first noticing each other in a New York hotel bar, are really thrown together by God, as if He doesn't have better things to do. Neither partner exhibits the slightest evidence of will. The movie watches as absurd coincidence keeps conspiring to push them together, so that neither of them will have to take responsibility for making a conscious decision to cheat on a nominally beloved spouse.

It really gets silly. He misses a plane, he can't get back in his room, he spills ink on his shirt, she offers him -- a complete stranger -- the use of her room to change shirts. On and on it goes. She has tickets to a concert and a friend calls to cancel so she has an extra. It's a concert he loves. On their way back, they're mugged; he fights the criminals off heroically. She's upset and needs comforting.

Yeah, stuff like that happens every day.

But it's not so much the absurdity of it as it is the preciousness. Figgis, a moody stylist, is in full bloom here, so that the movie feels like an extended perfume ad. It's rich, it's colorful, and it smells.

Those wacky twists keep coming. It turns out, finally, that Karen is the wife of the brother of one of Max's dying friends, so a few months later they are thrown together again, in mortal proximity, in the hospital room of Robert Downey Jr. This is a very depressing place, not because Downey's character is dying of AIDS but because Downey's career is dying of overacting.

Well, enough punishment by synopsis. The movie's ugliest stroke is its last, a "surprise" ending that will surprise only the feeblest of moviegoers. But again, it's not the cheapness of the surprise, it's the notion that these issues can be summed up in a single ironic stroke. Anyone with any acquaintance with the domestic agony of such things will recognize the fundamental phoniness of "One Night Stand."

One Night Stand is rated R for graphic sexuality.