One Day

I wish that I were still reading books. But I am a slow reader, and as a result I try to watch a movie adaption if I have any interest in a book. The other day, I watched the movie "One Day" based on David Nicholls' novel of the same title. It chronicles the lives of two people over a span of 20 years, on the same day every year - July 15. The predictable element is that the two people were destined to be together finally after many twists and turns of events, but eventually it was not a fairy tale of "they then live happily ever after". I found the movie rather light and even sometimes a bit tedious. Yet on the other hand, I found myself drawn to it, only partly because of Anne Hathaway's wonderful British accent. Then it occurred to me - it was in a way much closer to real life than most of those Hollywood romantic comedies.

In fact, I just have to reference what the literary critics wrote about the book, in order to explain why I bothered to watch the whole movie from beginning to end. John O'Connell writes, "For, in spite of its comic gloss, One Day is really about loneliness and the casual savagery of fate; the tragic gap between youthful aspiration and the compromises that we end up tolerating. Not for nothing has Nicholls said that it was inspired by Thomas Hardy."

Yes, "One Day" may be a love story, but it’s no fairytale, as it portrays the dark side of growing up, the disillusionment, regrets and random cruelty of life.

According to Jonathan Coe, "It's rare to find a novel which ranges over the recent past with such authority, and even rarer to find one in which the two leading characters are drawn with such solidity, such painful fidelity, to real life."