One Day

I watched a movie to my liking after a long time yesterday. “One day” tells the story of two people – Emma and Dexter. The movie walks us through twenty years of their lives post university graduation but shows only one particular day from each of those twenty years.

To be honest, the story is very regular. It’s the same-old two very different people struggling to find themselves and their love for each other kind of story. Just as they grow and drift away from who they were from where the story takes off, their bond too weakens and strengthens. I am not going to review the movie. It may not be a brilliant movie but there are several things that I’d like to take away from this movie for my keeps. And this post is just about that.

What struck me most about the movie was how real to life it was. The movie brilliantly portrays the mediocrity gap which separates so many of us from our lofty, ambitious and sometimes unattainable dreams. The way confidence wanes away when things are not happening, the way you cannot hide your utter dismay at doing things you never wanted to, the way you create a make-believe world to lie to yourself, the way life sometimes just refuses to work out – all of this has been brilliantly captured through Emma’s character as she struggles to make a living in her initial days and then settles for a life with a man she is not in love with.

Another thing that I really liked was the way the movie tracks a dwindling and yet passionate friendship between the two. This time it really isn’t just about the love between a boy and a girl. It’s about a relationship, which could be just any relationship, and how it’s so precious and yet rusting away. In one of their meetings after three years, Emma tells Dexter, “I love you, Dex, so much. I just don't like you anymore. I'm sorry.” This is something I would like to tell so many, just so many people in my own life. This line somehow beautifully summarizes what most relationships in life eventually turn out to be. It’s true. With time, we find it difficult to accept that our old people have changed, whether for good or for bad, whether for real or for not. If they somehow don’t suit our preferences, are not compatible with the decisions we’ve made in life, they stick out like an incorrect piece in a puzzle. We love them fiercely, well at least in my case I do, but we can’t somehow stand them for who they are today. And isn’t that what real life is like?

Real life is not pretty all the time. Often it’s creepy and oftener it’s embarrassingly true. We’d like to believe that everything works out at the end, yet sometimes for some life may not work out, even till the end. Yet, call it optimism or helplessness, we find beauty even in the morsels left behind by life. And almost always, we find a way.