The correct response to the film One Day is, apparently, to cry your eyes out. Me, I couldn’t squeeze a single tear; in fact the sentiment I could barely suppress throughout was rising irritation. If ever two characters needed a slap it’s the hero and heroine of One Day. Let me explain. This is a film based on David Nicholls’s best-selling novel — and I don’t think I’m giving too much away here given the number of spoiler reviews — about a boy and a girl who never quite get it together for years and years, almost until it’s too late.
For most of 20 years, in fact, between 1988 and 2004, she fancies him and he quite fancies her but he is so distracted by the number of floozies who want to have sex with him, he never quite realises that the girl he nearly slept with on their graduation day at Edinburgh University, the one he finds pretty and intelligent with strong views on nuclear weapons, is in fact the girl he should have married right at the start. Fortunately, she has been holding a candle for him for about 14 years.
Well, what’s the problem? It is that women, to judge from the response on the internet, seem to regard One Day as Groundhog Day, namely, the story of their lives. It’s an extended exposition, in fact, of what’s known as British men’s Failure To Commit (see Bridget Jones, passim). It’s about a man who seems to be as untroubled by the instinct to settle down and have a family (when Dexter does, it’s by accident) as, well, an awful lot of men of that vintage. Hardly less marvellous is Emma’s willingness to hanker after him all that time rather than finding a better offer while she still looks fabulous (not every woman actually improves with age, as Anne Hathaway does here).
For women, the really pernicious thing about the story, book as well as film, is that it plays to the notion that there is, out there, your ideal mate, and you just have to hang on for long enough until he turns up. Well, there may well be a Dexter for your Emma. But if there isn’t, there’s almost certainly a Tom, Dick, Harry or Tristram who is a perfectly decent alternative. The pervasive illusion of there being just one soulmate out there is one of the reasons why so many women fail to take a pragmatic approach to relationships — which is not necessarily to settle for the ghastly compromise character in this film. A couple of years back, a friend, a delightful girl with idealistic ideas about love, wrote to tell me breathlessly that she had met, late in life, The One; my heart sank. And duly, The One turned out to be a rubbish mate, overburdened by the weight of expectation she had put on the relationship. One Day has unfortunate overtones of that Disney number Some day My Prince Will Come. He might, he might not; get on with it.
As the Daily Mail journalist Liz Jones sagely observed, apropos of the film, ‘the perfect man does not exist’. Normally, it’s female romantic novelists who peddle us this notion of The One; David Nicholls makes an unlikely, New Labourish Barbara Cartland. For men, it must be rather gratifying to think that even if you do put a decent girl on hold for a decade or two, she’ll still be there for you. But for both sexes, the idea that destiny has provided for you some Platonic Other whom you’ve just got to find, undermines your capacity to settle down and make the best of things. You end up, as one male friend said, in a funk in case you’ve fluffed it, and going for the wrong candidate because you don’t know who The One is. It’s one of the umpteen reasons why so many people stay single far too long.
It’s at times like this that you hanker after the pragmatic approach to matrimony of earlier times, when men didn’t have commitment issues and women didn’t have cod-mystical ideas about the pefect mate, but both regarded settling down as the normal, grown-up thing to do. Thomas More was my favourite pragmatist. He took a shine to the younger girl in a family of sisters, but thinking it would reflect badly on the eldest if her sibling married first, he married the older one instead. Jane Austen, of course, was wonderfully commonsensical about these things; she sent up the notion of romantic love in Sense and Sensibility, in which Sensibility, aka Marianne, ends by ditching her obsessive romanticism and marrying a man who wears vests and has sensible views. Given a toss-up between Mrs Bennet and David Nicholls’s Emma, I know which approach to relationships makes more sense. That’s why One Day should have a health warning along with its 12A certificate: this film can damage your chances of happiness. Avoid it.
Comments