“I love you, Dexter, I just don’t like you anymore,” a radiantly moist-eyed Anne Hathaway tells a radiantly plastered Jim Sturgess at a crucial emotional juncture in “One Day,” Lone Scherfig’s attractive, involving and curiously unmoving attempt to replicate the cosy, literate-but-not-too-literary British comforts of her 2009 “An Education.”
Cribbed by screenwriter David Nicholls from his own mega-selling novel — the kind of fast-digesting doorstop that’s been a ubiquitous presence on London public transport for the past two years — the line is one of those reductively heart-on-sleeve sentiments that Richard Curtis sharpened to a blunt point in his 1990s heyday; when Hathaway drops it, you can hear the film straining for its own place in the pop culture quote bank, somewhere between “Is it still raining? I hadn’t noticed” and “I’m just a girl standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her” in the swoon-cringe stakes.
If the film surrounding that moment seems unlikely to carry it to such relative heights, that’s because it’s at once less appealing and more adventurous than the bulk of the calculated Working Title charmers on which it is modelled. For starters, it’s one of the more neurotically male-minded films ever to be marketed as a lavender-scented chick flick.
“I’m going to bring back the letter,” a flustered Patricia Clarkson announces as she makes her way to our lunch table, ever-so-slightly rain-mussed but otherwise immaculate in black and cream, a jaunty matching fedora astride her familiar blonde mane. “I’m never late. I blame email for this. I’m only just getting acquainted with it.”