Review of One Day (2011) by Shiira — 24 Sep 2011

One day, a young man from America, on a layover in Vienna, having sensed some connection with a sublime French girl he enjoyed chatting with, who, as serendipity would have it, changed seats when an arguing couple had disturbed the bilingual nymph's reading, would convince the near-stranger to follow him and continue their easy flirtation and banter, while the train pulled out of Austria without her.

According to the ephemeral lovers, it was July 16 in Richard Linklater's "Before Sunrise", just a 24-hour differential from July 15, 1992 in "One Day", the year that Dexter, a budding a**hole, convinces his best friend, a budding writer, to go on holiday with him.

This invitation comes in the nick of time, since Emma's job as the manager of a greasy-looking Tex-Mex restaurant is just about ready to kill her. While Celine was visiting her grandmother in Budapest, and Jessie, gauzy and infinitesimal from wandering around Italy like a transitory jilted love, unaware of what fate would await him, the Edinburgh graduates were in their third year of a platonic relationship, mostly due to the blue blood playboy's assessment of Emma, who lacks the proper lineage and refinement.

The working-class girl, wrongly thinking that their "just friends" status was her idea, sets up rules in the car, which she, nevertheless, hopes Dex will break during the course of their vacation.

Chronologically, "One Day" begins in 1998, six years after Dex almost declares his love for Emma while skinny-dipping in a man-made lagoon. This explains why the then-struggling novelist would swim regularly in public pools.

Being water-bound, being wet and chlorinated, for Emma, who passes the time with an unfunny stand-up comedian she doesn't love, puts her in communion with that sensual night in the partitioned brine where Dex almost put class differences aside and finally started being honest with himself.

It's the best she can do during the intervening years that the star-crossed friends part company, on account of the talk show host's many demons. If only Emma had better musical taste. Ten years earlier, had it not been for a fatal mistake in setting the right romantic mood for a dormitory room tryst, when she sets the needle down on "Talkin' Bout a Revolution", Tracy Chapman's rabble-rousing call for a poor people's insurrection against bourgeoisie types like Dex.

Indeed, he heeds the singer-songwriter's warning to "run...," while Emma, the amateur seductress, brushes her teeth for a man that feels nothing about the great unwashed "standing in the welfare lines".

Because she had missed Dex's attempt to sneak out of the room, as a consequence, the gawky woman with the dubious pedigree would resign herself to being his personal stooge. If only Emma knew how close he came to humiliating her former novice lover-self.

Jessie would put up with Tracy Chapman. Just hear the music he has to put up with. Making up the itinerary as they go along, the improvising tourists end up at a record shop, where in the listening booth, Celine cues up Kath Bloom's "Come Here", which isn't Jessie's cup of tea at all, but the folk singer's lilting voice starts to work on the American, and in an instant, he falls irrevocably in love with the strange girl, whom initially, he probably just wanted to seduce.

As day turns to night, they find an outdoor cafe, and while they talk and drink coffee, a fortune teller approaches their table, then proceeds to read Celine's palm. After the old woman leaves, the cynical American, so eager to unmask the hag as a charlatan, enacts his idea of an honest palm reading, predicting Celine's future with uncanny accuracy, since in "Before Sunset", her days indeed had become "a tedious collection of hours," but she has only herself to blame.

Whereas Dex has social class issues, Celine had dismissed Jessie for being American. She cursed herself. In all likelihood, Celine probably made up the story about why she missed their appointed rendezvous in December on that same Viennese railway.

Even before Celine's reservations about the US calcified into a hardline anti-American stance, you hear the snobbery in her younger self when she lampoons our collective persona during the club scene with the pretend phones.

Celine all but admits her mistake when she tells Jessie, "...you just believe they'll be many people whom you'll connect with," adding, with a grimmer face, that "later in life, you realize it only happens a few times.

" For Dex too, "young and stupid" like Celine, it only dawns on him later in life how he missed out on true love, due to his petty prejudices. He could have written the waltz. When Celine sings, "It was for you just a one-night thing," the performer actually means "me", since it was she who had wrongly dismissed the idea of eternity in a day.

Dexter knows the feeling. As a result, both Jessie and Emma wrote about the great loves of their lives, so careless in handling hearts.