One Night Stand

ONE NIGHT STAND is director Mike Figgis's morality play about casual sex in the age of AIDS. Max Carlyle (Wesley Snipes) travels to see his old friend Charlie (Robert Downey, Jr.) in New York and winds up in an act of infidelity with a beautiful stranger named Karen (Nastassja Kinski). Max's one night stand is not a source of fear or guilt, but rather a crisis that leads him to question the life he's built and is so easily convinced to betray. That life, as a family man and director of shallow commercials in Los Angeles, is best embodied in his demanding wife Mimi, a Hollywood socialite who only connects with her husband on apparently superficial levels. Mimi is played by Ming-Na Wen, who steals the show in her supporting role (except when Robert Downey, Jr. is on the screen, stealing the show even more in his supporting role as Max's friend, who is dying of AIDS). Making subtle use of his multiracial cast, writer-director Mike Figgis has crafted a dramatic tale about love, sex, and betrayal.