One Day (2011)

Nine years ago I bought David Nicholls's One Day only to stop reading it after a hundred pages because I didn't like it. Years later, when I learnt that it had been adapted into a movie starring Anne Hathaway, I decided to watch the movie instead to know how the story ended. And I did not like it. Earlier this month I gave the book another chance and I liked it enough to consider giving the film another shot. Unfortunately, unlike the book, the second time was not a charm. 

The story follows the lives of Emma Morley (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter Mayhew (Jim Sturgess), starting with an almost one-night stand on their graduation night, on July 15, 1988. They decide to stay in touch but, over the course of eighteen years, they grow apart as they choose different paths and we are shown what they are up to on the same day, July 15, every year. 

Despite the fact that it's relatively faithful to the source material —there are so many pointless changes though, like Emma and Dexter not having sex on graduation night, and Dexter teaching in Paris instead of Rome—, Lone Scherfig's One Day is a lacklustre adaptation as the plot is never compelling; on the contrary, it's rather dull and often feels dragged, and the year-skipping is handled so terribly, it feels as if a drunk, maybe Dexter himself, made the film.

No matter how uninteresting and unengaging the story ended up being on screen, the worst aspect of the screenplay easily is the characters.  The persona of Emma Morley has been simplified so much that she comes off as some annoying, bitchy damsel (in distress) waiting for Prince Charming instead of the smart, independent, successful woman she is in the novel, and her witty sense of humour is nowhere to be found. As for Dexter, he is just a wasted, selfish alcoholic with no depth whatsoever. Where's the dreamy, charming man from the book? The one Emma falls in love with? The one the reader/the audience falls in love with? In addition, the thoughts of the characters are completely left out. I get that it was not that easy to translate them on screen, but how are we supposed to care about them and be emotionally invested if we don't know anything about them? I'm not a fan of voice-overs but in this case, it could have helped. The supporting characters are so flat, shallow and bland, they are not even worth mentioning. 

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With such a poor script and probably even poorer direction, there's nothing the actors can do to elevate the film. The problem is that they don't even try. Anne Hathaway gives yet another boring performance and her Yorkshire accent is atrocious, Jim Sturgess gives such a cheesy performance, and the chemistry between them is just off. As for the supporting cast, One Day does a wonderful job at wasting such a talented actress as Patricia Clarkson. 

Despite all the flaw, One Day isn't a complete waste of time. While it certainly isn't the most absorbing and involving stories on screen, some parts of the story are quite interesting, the cinematography is quite beautiful, the scenery is gorgeous and the soundtrack, although some song choices are beyond cheesy, is pretty good. 

Dogville (2003)

As I've said the other day, my resolution for 2019 is to watch all those movies I've been meaning to watch since always but kept putting off for a reason or another. Dogville I put off because of the length and because, being honest, you have to be in the right mood to handle Lars von Trier. 

The film focuses on Grace Margaret Mulligan (Nicole Kidman), a beautiful young woman on the run from the mob who seeks refuge in Dogville, a small mountain town with a tight community of people who look after each other. The residents are reluctant at first, but, persuaded by the town’s philosopher, Tom Edison Jr. (Paul Bettany), they agree to hide her. In return, Grace agrees to work for them but nothing comes without a price and soon the people of Dogville begin to abuse her.

It’s a very simple story that appears calm, harmless, almost boring at the beginning, but, little by little, if you have the patience to stick around, the plot begins to develop and it slowly turns into a cruel, often unbearable story —I should have seen it coming as to shock the audience is typical of von Trier but the dramatic turn the story took really caught me by surprise— with a brilliant, astonishing twist at the end that will take your breath away.

It is a story rich with themes of arrogance, indifference, hypocrisy, greed, desire, mistrust, punishment, death and love. It is a story about power, corruption and corruptibility —power corrupts and the more the power the greater the corruption, is the film’s statement—; it is about human nature and morality, a portrait of America, but also of the entire world. In other words, Dogville contains misanthropy towards all humans.

The characters aren’t particularly three-dimensional people and don’t have much personality as they all are symbols that represent the dark side of humanity, but the time von Trier takes to set them up allows them to be entirely credible. The town of Dogville can also be considered a character as it is its small area that really helps to convey the hostility between the human characters.

The cast does a wonderful job —Nicole Kidman is magnificent as Grace; she brings so much vulnerability and fragility to her young, naïve character. Great support is provided by the supporting cast, Paul Bettany and Patricia Clarkson delivering the most powerful performances of the bunch. John Hurt does a marvellous job narrating as the narration is amusing and very moving.

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What stuck with me the most about Dogville is the style. The film is void of any visual constituents of a film; it is indeed set on a theatre stage with almost no props. There are no buildings, no plants, no animals, only drawings on the floor. It has no backgrounds —it’s black or white depending on the time of the day. The characters open and close invisible doors, they talk about non-existent objects. This is what truly made Dogville work for me. The very minimalistic stage magnifies the town’s residents’ interactions with Grace, they make their emotions more palpable as it allows the camera to linger on the actors’ faces without any distraction whatsoever. It’s the style that allowed me to fully immerse into the story, to experience everything event as if I was part of the story.

Ultimately, Dogville is a very long film —a nearly three hours—, and it’s often difficult to watch but it’s worth the effort/time as it is one of the most brilliant and unique films I’ve seen.