“AN Education” gave me high expectations of director Lone Scherfig, but novelist David Nichols’s screenplay for “One Day” rather lets her down.

The idea is good. Follow Emma and Dexter for a couple of decades by watching them on each anniversary of the day they graduated, met, made love and became friends, in that order.

Emma, independent, self-managing, is happy to go along with a platonic one-day-a-year relationship. Economically, her life isn’t a bed of roses.  In time, she forms a relationship with Ian, another member of the graduation-day crowd.

Ian aspires to be a stand-up comic, one of the most difficult trades in Yellow Pages. Dexter achieves transient notoriety by hosting a late-night TV interview program, sips sexual nectar from many blossoms and develops an unjustified self-esteem.

The screenplay may have suffered in conversion from the novel, but the film’s shortcomings come mainly from demanding that we read between its lines in haste.

Emma is easily liked (Anne Hathaway, unfazed by close-ups, faithfully recording her skin blemishes and generally doing honour to the character).

We feel sympathy for Ian (Rafe Spall), but little for Dexter, thereby giving the story an edge and making actor Jim Sturgess work really hard.

At Dendy, Hoyts and Limelight