Emma Morley (Ambika Mod) and Dexter Mayhew (Leo Woodall) meet at the university graduation party on July 15. He notices her. He had not seen her despite having been in the same place for years. Emma does know who is offering her a drink in the middle of a drunken crowd: Dex is attractive, friendly, popular and from a wealthy family and, as she herself theorizes, he possibly flirts with her because at his college he has already run out of girls to flirt with. take to bed.
Between kisses, insecurities and an unexpected ease of speaking, the two encounter something that was not in their plans: a friendship that survives the apparent differences between them and that introduction of a one-night stand. In the Netflix series, the viewer, as in the novel by David Nicholls that was already made into a film with Anne Hathaway, can see the development of this relationship from July 15 of the following years, beginning in that drunkenness from 1988 to 2007.
It is important that one idea be clear: Always the Same Day is an ideal, fun, exciting romantic comedy that knows how to develop its characters and maintains that sparkling dynamic so important in the genre. It confirms, like other cases of the last decade such as Lovesick or Every time we fall in love, that the commercial rom-com finds its best vein in television, displacing a cinema that, as if 90 or 100 minutes were a narrative limitation , now simplifies the genre and turns it into a rehash.
Screenwriter Nicole Taylor, who had worked on the gritty social drama Infamy, moves organically through a potentially treacherous format. Each installment has to tell a different July 15, place the viewer on the point where Emma and Dexter are, the point where their relationship is, offer tools to explore the romantic potential and not sniff the artifice.
For example, it has clever use of space with the help of director Molly Manners. She gives them an identity, whether it's Dexter's family home (further proof of her privileged status) or the Mexican restaurant where she works for a while (and where the workers have to sing La cucaracha). These help introduce the characters after the annual change. And, what is most commendable, Taylor resists falling into the theatricality of reducing Always the Same Day to intimate conversations on a stage.
That doesn't mean that I don't trust dialogue, the great tool of the genre. The conversations are sparkling and also work when they are not established between Dexter and Emma: Taylor understands that, if the viewer must follow the story for 14 episodes, the smartest thing is to understand that the romantic comedy must start from respect for the characters as individuals, beyond its dynamics.
In Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall, Always the Same Day has two allies. Like Emma, Mod conveys the extent to which her irony and sharp phrases are a defense mechanism, in addition to the insecurity generated by being with someone at the social antipodes of what she represents: a normal girl, of Indian descent, at times brilliant. , who has never stood out in social interactions.
Woodall, like Dexter, has that effervescent charisma that people perceived as attractive can have. After becoming a sexual icon for his role as a dim-witted kid in the spicy second season of The White Lotus, this change of record within the romantic comedy should catapult him to stardom. Let the papers rain down on him, please, because he disarms and his gaze endures the close-ups with the gallantry that the work requires.
And, chapter by chapter, year by year, Always the Same Day allows us to enjoy a friendship that goes beyond affinities: that complicity that can arise magically between two people, due to a matter of attitude or the way in which that their differences allow them to speak from a sincerity and perspective that other social circles do not offer them. It is the idea of the constant that helps anchor our existence.
Whether they end up together or not, the important thing is that Emma and Dexter have each other as a mirror to understand themselves from a sometimes painful honesty, and to help each other in the face of vital upheavals.
