One Day
Lone Scherfig
The story: After their graduation from the University of Edinburgh in 1988, shy Emma Morley (Anne Hathaway) spends a day and night with charming Dexter Mayhew
(Jim Sturgess). The film then returns to that one day, July 15, every year to trace the arc of their relationship over more than two decades. Adapted by David Nicholls from his best-selling 2009 novel of the same name.
How refreshing for a movie romance to be so free of artifice. You never get the sense that Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess (both below) are acting sexy or cute, or that they are calculatingly mugging for the camera.
Instead, this is a story about two people who make a connection and then have to figure out for themselves what that means.
When they first attempt to hook up after their graduation, it looks like a fling without much of a future. After all, they seem like such different people.
Emma comes across as serious, a little acerbic and gauche, while Dexter is more extroverted, the kind of guy that people are drawn to.
Yet, a friendship grows between them, one that is sustained by letters and telephone calls even if they are not always in the same city.
The idea to focus on one day a year over a period of 23 years can easily turn out to be a cheap gimmick, as the local film The Leap Years (2008) has shown.
But here, it works beautifully. The development of their relationship is sensitively handled and reveals how Emma and Dexter grow and change.
The going is hard for Emma at first. She wants to be a writer but finds herself stuck in waitressing. “Welcome to the graveyard of ambition,” is how she introduces a newcomer to the job.
Meanwhile, Dexter finds fame on television as a host but success goes to his head and booze and drugs get the better of him.
It is a heartbreaking moment when Emma realises that you can love someone but not like him anymore.
The two leads slip into their roles so thoroughly that you are completely drawn into their relationship and the turns that it takes as it wends through the years.
Hathaway came to audiences’ attention as the sweet young thing in The Princess Diaries films (2001, 2004) and then as the put-upon ingenue in The Devil Wears Prada (2006). In recent years, she has begun to win notice for her acting, most notably for the family drama Rachel Getting Married (2008).
One Day is another reminder that she is not just another pretty face.
Late in the film, Emma blossoms as a writer living in Paris and Hathaway finally gets to be gorgeous in an Audrey Hepburn kind of way though her character charmingly calls the look “butch”.
Sturgess is even better. The singer- actor broke out in the musical romance Across The Universe (2007) and is equally convincing as a shallow young man and as an older, wiser Dexter. He taps into the darker aspects of the character while conveying a touching sense of vulnerability.
The audience’s sense that it is watching flesh and blood characters is further bolstered by how the film was made.
Reflecting her Dogme 95 film background, Danish director Lone Scherfig’s follow-up to her lauded An Education (2009) looks like it was shot with natural light. It feels organic as opposed to some slick and glossy Hollywood product.
One Day will have you falling in love with movie romances once more.
(ST)