'One Day': A Hathaway-Sturgess date movie

Falling in love with Anne Hathaway isn't the hardest challenge British actor Jim Sturgess has faced. But proving they had chemistry -- pretty much instantly -- well . . . that was tougher.

"It's horrible -- they call it a 'chemistry read,' " says Sturgess, describing his first meeting with the Academy Award nominee. "It's like a blind date, but with producers watching to see if anything ignites."

Lucky for Sturgess, he and Hathaway hit it off, and were cast as romantic leads Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morley in "One Day," a new film from Danish director Lone Scherfig, opening Aug. 19.

The film, based on the bestselling novel, both written by David Nicholls, tracks Em and Dex starting July 15, 1988, when they graduate from college in Edinburgh and meet for what seems like a one-night stand. We pop in on them pretty much every July 15 for 20 years, catching them together, apart, in love, infuriated with each other. We know, of course, they're meant for each other -- but they don't, and as years and hairstyles pass, one starts to worry they may never get it right.

"That basic dramatic tool -- you see their love but they don't -- dates back to Shakespeare," says Scherfig, whose previous film, "An Education," earned an Academy Award nomination for best picture.

What makes this tale unique, however, is the structure. Shakespeare may have delivered on "star-crossed lovers," but he didn't fiddle with time. In the romantic film biz, it's a device that seems to satisfy.

There are lots of "slice of life" films, recounting love stories that last days or weeks, but some of the more iconic film romances reveal their lovers sporadically.

"The Way We Were," "When Harry Met Sally . . . ," "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and "Brokeback Mountain" introduce couples and then revisit them after spans of months or years. "Annie Hall" does so neurotically, jumping back and forth in time. "Doctor Zhivago" is a symphony of crisscrossed lives, as world wars and revolutions rage on.

The most obvious example is 1978's "Same Time, Next Year," with Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn accidentally being booked into the same motel room. They fall for each other, Johnny Mathis starts crooning the theme song, and the lovers rendezvous annually after that.

But "One Day" is different.

"In 'Same Time, Next Year,' the characters agree to meet -- they have an appointment," says Nicholls. In the other films, we pop in at key moments. His plot device, he admits, is more random.

"The randomness of the day determined what I wrote about," says Nicholls. "The image in my head was of leafing through a photograph album, seeing snapshots, these little captured moments, and noting shifts in their relationship."

The device enables Nicholls to tell his story with scenes that are not so obvious -- or predictable.

"You don't see the day Dexter becomes a father," notes Scherfig. No -- you see his first day baby-sitting alone. And thus learn, oh, he's got a kid now.

"All the conventional heights of their lives would never be on the same day," Scherfig continues. "So you see the scenes next to the normal, or more conventional, scenes."

As storytelling devices go, the time manipulation works, if only because it answers that common moviegoer question: What happens next?

"We get to the end of a lot of movies and say, 'I wonder if they'll stay together,' " notes Alan Inkles, director of Staller Center and the Stony Brook Film Festival. "I like films where you follow them through time. It starts giving you those answers."

Hathaway and Sturgess passed their chemistry test with flying colors, eventually chumming around on set, chatting about music, even exchanging mix tapes. (Hathaway was into Patti Smith, while he "just played her loads of English bands she'd never heard of," Sturgess recalls.)

"I think everyone has a Dexter or Emma in their lives," says Sturgess, envisioning those longtime relationships that keep evolving. "That's why the book has appealed to so many."

But unlike standard romances, "One Day" doesn't wax on about finding that one true love, blah blah, blah.

The lesson here is more about patience. For much of the story, "they're never quite the right version of Emma and Dexter to each other," says Nicholls. "Dexter is too immature, Emma is too self-pitying." Finally, finally, they get there -- only to face new obstacles.

Scherfig, speaking by phone from a vacation home in Denmark, took another lesson from the film.

"Emma and Dexter are really much happier than they know -- they don't count their blessings," says Scherfig. "Sometimes you're in the middle of the happiest years of your life and you don't realize it. I'm standing in a forest, by the water, in an old bathrobe, friends were out to the house and everything's super-happy, and I was thinking I should remember . . . to . . . to realize that," she says, laughing.

Love, not necessarily American style

BY JOSEPH V. AMODIO, Special to Newsday

The book may have been set in Edinburgh, London, Paris and other parts Europeanish. But that didn't stop producers from contemplating how to make the story . . . more American.

But early on, producer Nina Jacobson said no -- setting "One Day" in the United States just wouldn't work.

"Americans say what they feel," says British author and screenwriter David Nicholls. "Nina said the story would be over in the first year because Emma and Dexter would be frank about their feelings, and that would be that. English people are never as straightforward. So we have the opportunity to build up endless misapprehensions and confusions," he says, laughing.

Oh, sure, they cast an American anyway. But Anne Hathaway has to hem and haw with a British accent the whole way through.