At first, as its title suggests, Mike Figgis' One Night Stand looks like it will be about a romantic encounter, followed by the inevitable emotional fallout and related cultural commentary. Max (Wesley Snipes) is a sophisticated, self-confident director of television commercials. In New York City on assignment, he's introduced on the street, working his way through sidewalk crowds, speaking directly to the camera in order to set up his situation. We learn that he's married to Mimi (Ming-Na Wen), has two young children, and likes his work and life just fine.

We also learn that while he's in town, he'll be reuniting with Charlie (Robert Downey Jr.), a choreographer he hasn't seen for five years: they had a falling out around the time Max relocated to L.A. But, he adds, he still considers Charlie his "best friend," naming an unresolved intimacy that comes back to haunt One Night Stand, well beyond its formal conclusion.

Max is immediately careful to say that Charlie is gay, but he is not. As if to punctuate this point, within minutes Max spots an unspeakably beautiful woman, Karen (Natassja Kinski), in an upscale hotel lobby. She's gorgeous in the way that dream girls are in the movies (or more precisely, the way that Kinski is in that Visa Platinum commercial currently running on TV), immaculately lit and framed, with blond hair falling delicately and in slow motion over her sculpted face and a rich jazzy accompaniment on the soundtrack. For his part, Max is also impeccably charismatic, Snipes' beautiful features highlighted by similarly luscious lighting and edgy camerawork, as they exchange brief, erotic glances. Even if you didn't know they were the movie's destined-to-be-together stars, this sharply orchestrated non-meeting makes clear that they'll soon be in each other's arms, shot in soft-focus, artfully fragmented angles.

However, what occurs in the next couple of hours is more perverse than predictable. It's to the film's credit that the interracial aspect of the liaison is not the point. Yet, it also has trouble representing complex moral situations without resorting to stereotypical images and ideas. After Max misses his shoot because of an elaborate midtown traffic jam (complete with plenty of carnivalesque costumes—the world is upside down, anything can happen, etc.), he returns to the hotel and hooks up with Karen. They attend a Beethoven recital by the Juilliard string quartet (read: deeply moving aesthetic experience). As she's watching him watch the performance, erotic tension appears to be mounting. But little does she know, he's thinking back on his visit with Charlie earlier in the day (we know this because of a distractingly unsubtle, eerily black and white flashback), where he confronted the fact that his "best friend" is HIV-positive.

The easy read here is that Charlie's impending illness forces Max to reconsider his own life, makes him feel unnerved to the point that he has sex with Karen. But while One Night Stand does deliver the expected tryst and Max's crises of conscience and identity, these events are framed in increasingly bewildering ways. In order to ensure Max's sympathetic moral plight, for instance, the film ups the vulnerability ante: after the performance, Karen and Max are mugged in a parking lot. His assailant is a burly cretin, hers a dyke-ish woman: seeing Karen at knifepoint is apparently too much for Max, and he erupts into a Wesley-Snipes-style action-assault, sending the would-be thieves hightailing it into the night.

I can't begin to describe the strangeness of this scene, how contrived and grotesque it seems (emphasized by a series of flashbacks occurring while Max and Karen try to sleep in separate beds in her hotel room later that night). You could argue that it underscores Max's extreme uncertainty at this moment, seduced by Karen's sensual presence and frightened by the transgression he's barely imagining. The attack and resulting trauma propel them into an affinity that's both accidental and unavoidable, innocent and guilt-inducing. You could also see it as a setup for the film's increasingly odd representations of Max's situation.

While Max and Karen agree to "be adult," to treat their one night stand as such and return to their respective marriages, this becomes impossible for several reasons. Mimi picks up Max at the airport, whereupon she proceeds to razz him (not knowing how right she is) concerning his activities ("You bad boy, staying an extra night?") and the family dog sniffs aggressively at his crotch. His voiceover kicks in, describing his progressive estrangement from his wife (who comes off as an awkwardly demanding sexual partner, explicitly instructing him in a way that contrasts wildly with the completely in-synch, shared passion of his night with Karen) and his preoccupation with Charlie's illness, which becomes a clumsy metaphor for his own developing ethical quandary.

"A year later," reads the caption, Max returns to New York in order to stay with Charlie, now visibly diseased and dying. Coming to terms with death, and more pointedly, the particular ugliness of death by AIDS, Max spends much time in Charlie's hospital room, where he meets an array of colorful characters (including Ione Skye, Xander Berkeley and Julian Sands, all playing "outrageous" to varying degrees). He also learns that Karen is—inconveniently or conveniently, depending on your sense of the absurd—the wife of Charlie's uptight, homophobic brother Vernon (Kyle MacLachlan). At this point, the film's moral scheme is obvious, such that the sensitive, intelligent characters are lined up against the ignoramuses (Karen is literally a rocket scientist).

Perhaps the oddest scene in the movie comes one night when Karen and Max find themselves together in Charlie's room. Imagining themselves "alone" as he's sleeping, they fall into a desperate kiss. But Charlie wakes from his wheezing, fitful sleep, his eyes widening above his oxygen mask as he's quite alarmed to see his sister-in-law locked in this illicit embrace with his dear friend. And this moment leads to another, weirder one, where Max tearfully confesses his indiscretion while Charlie lays sweating on his deathbed. This leads indirectly to another, even more surreal scene in which Charlie appears after death, in a jester's outfit, to advise Max on his love life. And so Charlie is transformed into a kind of guardian angel, granting absolution for the confused and sinful heterosexuals.

The film's resolution of its many complicated relationships is both ambiguous and too-tidy. Its use of Charlie as an emotional and moral pivot for everyone else's predicaments is telling, in that it never quite comes to terms with the assertion that Charlie makes within his first five minutes on screen, that Max is unsure of his own sexuality. This isn't to say that Charlie is merely indulging in wishful thinking or that Max might be gay. The dilemmas they embody aren't nearly so reductive or trite (and, for what it's worth, this movie's troubling messiness is, for the most part, more intriguing than the neat distress-and-redemption package offered by Figgis' previous film, Leaving Las Vegas).

In fact, One Night Stand seems intensely and disturbingly unable to pull itself together, despite overt efforts to wrangle a coherent denouement from its convolutions. And it's these failed efforts that make it interesting, if not exactly good or satisfying. It's in this context of failure that Charlie's observation becomes generally thematic, hinting at the ways that desires for security, self-consciousness and self-destruction intermingle and collide.

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