Fridae

Ordinarily if two acquaintances manage to get themselves drunk, seduce each other into spending the night together, and then manage to botch their tryst in spectacular fashion, you would expect them to go to great lengths to avoid each other for the rest of their lives. Because this is a romantic comedy you’re watching, the principal characters make a decision to stay platonic friends and become best friends. And because the film you’re watching is adapted from a chick lit novel with pretensions to a class above the Oprah Book Club selection, the literary device here is you get to see the two friends catch up with each other either in person or otherwise year after year, on the anniversary of the day they almost had casual sex with each other.

In One Day, Emma (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter (Jim Sturgess) call, write, or meet each other once a day on 15 July from 1988 to 2008. Never mind that he’s an upper class twit and vacuous playboy and she’s an insecure middle class girl who wants to make a difference in the world. But for the purposes of having a romcom, it must be established that such a pairing will make for very good platonic friends – the sort that will stick by each other through thick and thin, rain or shine, for better or for worse, no matter the disparity in their stations in life at any point.

To the credit of the script and the efforts of the principal actors, the conceit as well as the literary device seem natural and unobtrusive. Remarkably, even the emotional manipulation such a romantic film relies on to push the plot to its very predictable conclusion. (Dear reader, she marries him eventually.) Incredibly, instead of feeling as though the years are flying past with each almost repetitive reiteration of the annual 15 July meetup of the two friends, you might get the impression that secretly, this romcom has something profound to say about the passage of time.

While there are moments in this film where its pacing may sag, where Anne Hathaway’s faux Yorkshire accent mutates more fantastically than the alien-possessed humans in The Thing, or where you feel this will be remade as an arty Korean romantic melodrama, you will nonetheless be taken in by its sentimentality and emotional depth, and its superior storytelling.