(courtesy IMP Awards)
We’re well used to romantic comedies that offer us epic love, sweeping heartstopping moments and happy-ever-after moments in abundance.
If real life does intrude, it’s all but tangential and near accidental, and so, as reality swoops relentlessly and often disappointingly ordinary in its scope and effect around us, we can rest easy and in sigh-uttering contentment into love stories that defy the odds, ignore the grim realities of life and send the characters we come to love into a blissful lives that don’t have to bother with messy fuss and bother of being alive.
It’s lovely but all a little dissatisfying? After all, doped up on romantic bliss as we might be, we have to go back into that real world we just escaped for a short time, and so, it’s actually wonderful to have One Day, first a book, then a film and now a 14-part Netflix adaptation that serves up love on the grandest timescale possible but with a sage understanding that dark and terrible things can still intrude on even the most loveliest of things.
If that all sounds like a gigantic bummer on the effervescence of grand sweeping romance, in the hands of author David Nicholls, who also acted as one of the executive producers of the new production, it is anything but, instead offering up epic love with the sort of life moments we are all too familiar with along for what turns out to be a highly satisfying if desperately emotionally bone-shaking ride.
———– SPOILERS !!!!! ———- Before we go any further, for those who haven’t read the book, and yes, strangely enough, this book-obsessed reviewer is somehow among them, there’s one moment in this series – the end of episode for those that like to be forewarned; though don’t even try to forearm yourself emotionally since it just can’t be done – that will absolutely and completely rip your heart out, rip it into tiny, bloodied pieces and having you SOBBING and ugly crying for much of the final and fourteenth episode.
———- MORE SPOILERS !!!!! ———- In short, one of the two couple at the centre of the story dies.
By that time that Emma Morley (Ambika Mod) is hit by a bike on her way to meet the love of her life (and she is most definitely of his), Dexter Mayhew (Leo Woodall), you are as in love with these two beautiful people as they are in love with each other; in fact, because you have seen SO MUCH of the ups and downs of their lives you feel so invested in them, that Emma’s passing feels like the death of someone you know.
It is THAT truly heartbreakingly intense.
But first, we get to meet Emma and Dexter on the same night they meet each other on 15 July 1988 at a huge party bash to mark the end of studies for the entire cohort of that year’s students at a grand and gilded hall.
Everyone is dressed up to the absolute nines, and in one strikingly life-changing moment, Emma turns around to see Dexter and something connects between them, to the extent that they spend a platonic night and then morning together before going their separate ways.
Only they don’t go too separately for long; that Christmas, Emma spends the festive season with Dexter and his parents, Alison and Stephen (Essie Davis and Tim McInnerny respectively) and they become fast and enduring friends who keeps passing into and out of each other’s lives at pivotal and quite ordinary moments too, with each episode focusing on what is happening to them on 15 July of each successive year, right up until 2002 when ———- SPOILER !!!!! ———- Emma sadly dies.
The idea of capturing these two quite different people – Emma is an English major and aspiring writer who is definitely on the nerd side of the spectrum while Dexter, from a wealthy family, is a sweet, nice but sometimes shallow party boy who pursues a career in junk TV – on one particular day of the day comes from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, with this key passage read aloud by Emma to Dexter on one particular moment together.
That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.
So much of what drives their rich and deep friendship is distilled into those successive 15 Julys, which capture Emma and Dexter at the dizzying heights and cataclysmic lows of life where either the promise of their youthful, just graduated university has been well and truly justified or they have fallen into holes so big they wonder if they escape them.
Escape them they do, with the help of a host of friends including Emma’s BFF Tilly (Amber Grappy), her ex Ian (Jonny Weldon), and Dexter’s wife and then ex Sylvia (Eleanor Tomlinson) who become the sort of found family that everyone who wants any kind of meaningful, richly connected life needs.
Persisting tenaciously through the periods of drunkenness and drug-fuelled lostness (Dexter) and menial jobs that don’t warrant all that investment in a major uni degree (Emma) is a powerful link between the two.
You can tell that on that first night they both fall head over hells for the rest of their lives in an instant but decisions and fears, life circumstances and messy happenstance conspire to leave them always orbiting close but not near enough to the love that eventually seizes them in its grip, long enough for them to enjoy some years as the couple they were always meant to be.
It might seem cruel to take Emma from Dexter just when they have finally conquered emotional reticence and socially awkward fears of rejection but if there is one thing that One Day excels at – and honestly, it excels at a LOT of things from richly-observed and realised characters to narrative touchpoints that beautifully capture the big and small moments of life that define us all for better or worse – it is portraying life as it actually is in all its poorly-executed glory.
We set out on the grand journey of life convinced we’ll nail every opportunity that comes our way and live the best kind of life such that Oprah will laud as the epitome of her life philosophy, but we make poor decisions, take wrong turns and f**k things up magnificently even as our hearts beat for the very best of things and for things as exquisitely good as love to seize us and never let us go.
One Day pours all of that into it wondrously complex and yet achingly simply story, with the performances by Mod and Woodall evoking so much emotion with the simplest of nods, wistful smiles or half-uttered, almost-heartfelt phrases.
You might think it’s the most frustrating of love stories because it doesn’t get anywhere fast – oh but it does; each episode is so full of great and wonderful and sadly disappointing things of life if you just pay attention – but it mirrors all our lives, reflecting back the same stop-and-start motion we have all grappled with, and how we want so much, especially that special someone who will remake everything into brighter, happier shades, and how for all our luminously high-reaching aspirations, we often end up disbelieving wallowing in the mud.
The thing about One Day that really strikes you is how life is rarely unsalvageable, a lesson that Emma and Dexter learn over and over again, and while you could argue there’s no coming back from the pain that rips through Dexter’s heart in the stunningly impactful final episode (there’s one conversation that breaks and heals at a fundamental level all at once), the series ends on a tentatively hopeful note and you wish with all your heart that Dexter will go on, holding Emma close in his heart, but ready to find out what’s waiting for him next in this big, messy, bruising and lovingly maddening business called life.
One Day streams on Netflix.