After the extravagant acclaim for Leaving Las Vegas, Mike Figgis appeared to take leave of his senses with One Night Stand, and he appears to have still not found his way back to them, with this jumbled think-piece in which a black Adam and blond Eve roam around a butterscotch world of bucolic bliss in their birthday suits, in pedantic contrast to a series of hard lessons in the sex education of the modern-world protagonist: a tyke in colonial Kenya in the Fifties (where he peers through a Venetian blind at a black girl in her undies, reading aloud to a mummified white man in a rocker), a teen in swinging England in the Sixties (where he blunders into an upstairs bedroom following his father's funeral, just in time to catch his girlfriend upchucking on her make-out partner), and now a middle-aged film director who we may surmise is Figgis's alter ego. At one point — what could be considered the high point by a certain type of connoisseur — our Adam and Eve take turns making tinkle in a lake. Any thrill from that, or from any other window-fogging part, will be hugely outbalanced by periods of aimlessness, tedium, obscurity, and pretension. Figgis dispenses his own brand of puritanism. With Julian Sands, Saffron Burrows, Femi Ogumbanjo, and Hanne Klintoe. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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