Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall.Photo:Netflix
Netflix
If you don’t choose Netflix’s new romantic epicOne Dayas your Valentine’s Day binge, you probably don’t deserve to feel the happyfffwap!of Cupid’s bow in your heart. For that matter, whatever boxed chocolates you receive should be filled with ash.
If that sounds harsh, so is love. That’s just one of the lessons of this emotionally swamping, completely addictive British series starringThe White Lotus’sLeo Woodalland Ambika Mod.
Based on David Nicholls' 2009 bestseller, the seriescovers nearly 20 years in the relationship of Dexter (Woodall) and Emma (Mod). We follow the pair’s progress — and setbacks — across 14 episodes, most covering a single year each, and all commencing on the same date: July 15. That’s when the two first hook up in 1988, spending the night together after a day of giddy excitement as freshly minted graduates of the University of Edinburgh.
At times this narrative setup can feel like a gimmick, and annoyingly arbitrary — slicing two lives into neat segments, as if they were vegetables being mandolined. ButDaytranscends all that. When Emma quotes a line fromGreat Expectations,something clicks: Consider any life, Dickens wrote: “Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been . . . 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.”
The series captures that strange magic and makes it somehow real. Romantic destiny may not really exist, but that’s no reason not to believe in it.
Best not to give away too much plot, other than to say Dexter is callow and privileged, a few rungs belowSaltburn,and not always picking up on his mother’s strong, useful hints that he ought to acquire a moral character, a spine or at least a few centimeters of psychological depth. Emma, on the other hand, is smart, artistic, ambitious, alert to world issues and awkwardly middle-class. She also has a deflective, smart-alecky sense of humor.
Dayis basicallyThe Way We Werefor Generation Z.
Matthew Towers/Netflix
You wouldn’t say that she and Woodall have much erotic oomph together. ButOne Day —which was previously adapted into a 2011 movie starringAnne Hathawayand Jim Sturgess — might not have worked so well if they did. If anything, a haunting sense of distracted sadness often creeps into their intimate scenes, like a cat that has something on its mind but can’t communicate what it wants.
The story at hand is more about longing than fulfillment, more about absence than union.
Near the end, the always literate Emma switches from quoting Dickens to Thomas Hardy. Let that be your tipoff.
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One Daydebuts Thursday on Netflix.
source: people.com
