Always the same day: 13 years after the film, because the Netflix series is booming

If a writer could sell five million copies in 40 languages with his love story truncated and at the same time immense (and if that film based on the book became the sentimental “education” of a generation), it is difficult for the series not to suffer the same fate. What if: Always the same day, product “son” and “grandson” of those two successes, repeats the boom on Netflix.

Dexter and Emma, ​​​​a 1988 Romeo and Juliet, propose a feature film based on the novel of the same name by David Nicholls, which he later made into a film Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess.

July 15, 1988. Without cell phones to facilitate communication and flirting, that breakup date on their calendars will mark them every year until 2007, even if they go their separate ways. The course of a relationship that can be eternal even without formally existing.

“One of the great cosmic mysteries,” the heroine immediately warns us: “How does a person go from being a complete stranger to being the most important person in your life?” Everything turns on when the popular Dexter (Leo Woodall) and the studious Emma (Ambika Mod) They try to spend graduation night together at the University of Edinburgh. From passion to friendship and from that phase to reconsidering whether the “red thread” inevitably unites them. A difficult connection with the label.

Partly due to circumstances, partly due to self-sabotage, this charming couple fails to achieve “together forever”. Or maybe yes: in their heads the other never stops existing and generating desire.

The “noise” that this new production generated among fans of the book and the film was accompanied by brutal criticism related to the comparison. It makes no sense to want to equate, for example, the heroine of the streaming version with that of the film version. Ambika Mod, British daughter of Indians, takes on the role of Hathaway with some intention of overturning the trend towards the usual model of Western beauty and imposes an interesting imprint on his interpretation.

Woodall, who many know from the second season of The White Lotus, rightly wears the dress of being self-centered and superficial and at the same time vulnerable and insecure. The actor fulfills the task of making the viewer angry in that personal confusion and in that labyrinth of emotions that distances him for years from what could be the great love of his life.

As far as narrative possibilities within 14 episodes (between 20 and 40 minutes), this production allows it a deeper development of the characters and years compared to the film, but at times it feels like a wasted effort that could have been summed up in four fewer chapters. Result: the pace drops.

Different social classes, apparent incompatibilities, different cultural traditions. None of this manages to undermine the strength of that relationship that the protagonists recall every time St Swithin’s Day, whose legend indicates that if it rains on July 15th it will also rain in the following forty days). Idealization and questions. What if love was something less sweetened and adrenaline-filled than what youth makes us believe? What if learning to value a person was a sort of post-graduate degree that can only be achieved by failing subjects? That dilemma haunts until the end, when we see them in the middle failed relationships, approaches to love, parenthood, work failures, separations, duels.

This British production respects that book atmosphere of the evolution of the protagonists, of a curve that goes from illusions and innocence to knockouts. It also beautifully shows that change in personal perspective that the passage of time generates. The final contrivance (without spoiling) elevates the love story, takes it to a level of greatness.

one day is digested with a certain ambivalence, on the one hand the sympathy and freshness generated by that powerful friendship that changes, survives and strengthens and, on the other, with the typical melancholy of a story that is the axis of that difficult transition to adulthood. It manages to move with the aim of underlining that growing old also means disintegrating. That wise acceptance of the great crack in a life: the distance between what is innocently planned in adolescence and what actually happens years later.

File:

Qualification: Well. Type: Romantic drama. Protagonists: Leo Woodall and Ambika Mod. Address: Molly Manners, Luke Snellin and others. Problem: Netflix (14 episodes).