Netflixable? “One Night Stand” stands around and talks for an hour

It’s not just the title that makes “One Night Stand” the raciest, most sexual Indonesian film to ever make it to Netflix.

It opens with a fevered road-side in-the-car hook-up — in broad daylight on the access road to an airport, no less — and ends with a bit of a bender that climaxes in the clenches.

But this being conservative Indonesia, it still earns a TV-14 rating — no nudity, nothing graphic and no profane come-ons or pillow talk.

Don’t let that smiley/flirty photograph posted above fool you. This is from late in the third act of what might be the slowest movie since that holiday favorite, the Yule Log-on-fire video.

The moment “they” meet inertia sets in. Ra (Jourdy Pranata), whom we’ve seen in the throes in that sex-before-flying prologue set one year earlier (?) has just landed in Yogyakarta for the funeral of his mentor’s wife. Lea (Putri Marino) was sent to pick him up.

And as the fetching assistant and the hunky young painter walk and talk through the airport at one third the normal speed, one first gets the feeling one is watching paint dry. In the humid, forever-to-dry tropics, no less. It’s as if the camera operator had a bum leg, or nobody involved wanted to leave the air conditioned indoors. SLOW walking.

There’s a lot of walking and talking and driving and talking in this film, with these two cute but dull characters sizing each other up and Ra not very coy about dodging the calls from some other woman back home. Was she the hook-up at the airport the year before? I think that’s implied, but their brief phone chats give NO clues, and do nothing to spice up the plot, or advance it.

He’s plainly interested in Lea, and after the funeral, makes his play. Would she accompany him to the wedding of an old friend?

The sole Around the World with Netflix value in this Adriyanto Dewo film — in Indonesian with subtitles — is in its depictions of Indonesian funeral rites and wedding traditions.

Agreeing to accompany a guy she just met doesn’t mean Lea won’t be subject to immersion in wedding prep rituals — made-up, hair-done and loaned a dress and welcomed as a member of the wedding party, even as a stranger.

It’s only after these two tentative, fairly tedious people get drunk on the beach that they “get real,” as the kids used to say. And get busy. But even that’s pretty tame.

Tedium itself, this “romance” has little point, and takes an absurd amount of slow-walking time getting to it.

Rating: TV-14, sex, drinking

Cast: Jourdy Pranata, Putri Marino

Credits: Scripted and directed by Adriyanto Dewo. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:20

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About Roger Moore

Movie Critic, formerly with McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Orlando Sentinel, published in Spin Magazine, The World and now published here, Orlando Magazine, Autoweek Magazine
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