Please, no more days.

At the very beginning of Lone Scherfig's One Day, a character is doing something that, say, if you've ever watched another movie, pretty clearly foreshadows a major incident later in the film. That the movie then jumps back about 20 years, just about confirms it.

Save for that jump back in time and a couple of other ones sprinkled throughout the film, the story propels forward in a standard, linear fashion. The story of Emma and Dexter (Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturges) begins--chronologically, that is--in 1988, when they meet during the night of their graduation from University. In a poorly edited sequence that thoroughly confused me, the two go back to her flat where they almost hook up, but end up not having sex--at least I think so. Instead the two part ways the best of friends, although their lives take on particularly divergent paths. Dexter becomes a television celebrity, hosting a late night dance show. Think of him as--and excuse the redundancy here--a cheesy Ryan Seacrest. Emma, the aspiring writer, is stuck--though reasonably happy at times--running a Tex-Mex restaurant. At the same time he's banging show dancers and groupies alike, Emma is being wooed by one of her waiters--Ian, an aspiring (and patently unfunny) comedian.

It's a peculiar trait Hathaway possesses that she can honestly and convincingly portray the ugly duckling phase of a woman's life--she did the same in The Princess Diaries and even The Devil Wears Prada. Sturges, on the other hand, brings very little depth to the character who sits at the center of the story. Granted, Dexter is meant to sort of just be a pretty face--a "himbo" in a sense--but if we're to empathize with him, as when his career goes kaput or when his marriage to another woman falls apart, there must be something there. There isn't.

Even in flawed or subpar movies, Hathaway will show great chemistry with her leading man. I'm thinking specifically of Love & Other Drugs with Jake Gyllenhaal. Here she and Sturges miss each other in the same way that Emma and Dexter continue to do. Yet Ian of course isn't a sufficient enough option for her either. Though a relationship occurs between them, he's nothing more than a Bellamy. It isn't quite fair that she only really gets to choose between the two (except for the brief fling she has with a Frenchman in Paris).

The film's conceit of each new sequence taking place on the same day also seemingly adds nothing to the story. That there is simply no apparent cosmic reason that every significant moment in these two characters' lives needs to happen every July 15 makes it come off as nothing more than a gimmick.

But in the end, the one thing that makes a film like this worthwhile is the romance between its central couple. It's too bad that in One Day, only one half of the party decided to show up.