Saturday night I went to the film One Day with a couple friends. It’s the new Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess film, which is based on the book with the same name (you may have seen my post from the other day with the Chelsea Lately interview of Anne Hathaway when she was promoting this film). By the preview, I could tell that I was going to cry. I could tell that it’s the kind of film that makes your fingers tingle because your heart hurts so much that the hurt spreads to the rest of your body. And I was right. It was really great and sad and I’m glad I watched it, but there were a few things that I wish had been done differently.
For starters, as you probably already know, the film follows a pair of best friends over the course of twenty years. The day they met held particular significance and the film marks every July 15th. This made the film, the beginning in particular, move by almost too quickly. Sometimes, when the two characters had grown apart, three or four years would go by in a succession without allowing the viewer to know what has happened in either of the characters lives. This made it hard to feel a real connection with them. By the end of the film, this obviously wasn’t a problem, but it did make it difficult to become invested in the characters in the beginning. The chronology also jumped around a little bit and made it semi-difficult to follow the order of events at certain points. I don’t know how the book is written, but I feel like this format would work better in literature than in a film.
Even though there were flaws, I really liked the story and Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess each had phenomenal performances. I want to read the book. Cue the waterworks.
xx
annhyphencharlotte 