Once

This is the kind of movie you never hear of until a friend comes up and asks if you've seen it. Then you find it, watch it, love it and pass the word yourself.

Once is an unconventional musical that chronicles a transformational week in the life of an angry, Dublin busker (Glenn Hansard of the Irish band Frames). He's a nameless Guy singing the pain of a relationship broken by betrayal and in the off hours fixing vacuums in his father's shop. His life opens up when a recently immigrated nameless Girl (Marketa Iglova) takes an interest in him, his music, and his vacuum fixing skills.

I am not a musician but I have always found musicians, especially singer-songwriters, fascinating. The brilliance of Once is in its understatement. What a treat to watch this story unfold through the intimate portrayal of musicians writing and singing together. The technique enables the characters to express their deepest feelings (as embodied in the sung lyrics and the playing of the music) without emoting or otherwise playing up the feeling of the song. They just play and realise they're a perfect fit for each other. The result is a growing ambiguity - though the songs were written about someone else, are they becoming an expression of their own developing relationship? It would be easy to believe so; the tagline of the film asks, "How often do you meet the right person?" The answer, of course, is the title of the film.

Guy and Girl make a great pair. Not only do they have onscreen chemistry, they recognise one anothers gifts and bring out the best in each other. Knowing their past heartbreak we yearn for their happiness but the film is not about a quick fix of happiness. Writer-director John Carney knows the human heart is not a vacuum cleaner. He wants to acknowledge all the realities of loneliness, hurt, hope and attraction, and privilege the long view to the temptation of the moment. Maybe we do only meet the right person once - but are we able to discern when that is? By what criteria can we? When Guy and Girl play in the closed music store, her on the borrowed piano, he on his guitar, and lift their voices to sing in perfect harmony, "Take this sinking boat and point it home, We've still got time," my spirit soars with theirs and I recognise two things: it'd be easy for them to find new love in the moment with each other and they're singing about something far different. They're singing the prodigal son, rising from his despair and imagining a return to a relationship once broken. That struck me as a wildly unique dramatic situation for a modern romantic musical and the film holds the tension throughout.

We may find great movies more than once each year, but they're rare enough that I'm confident this will stay on my top five films of 2008 list and you can bet I'll serve it up in a L'Abri film night slot. By the way, nameless Guy and Girl swear like Irish buskers (which is two grades below drunken sailor); even so there's so much truth, heart and beauty in this film, that we'd be cool to watch it with our kids. You can find this Irish import on DVD.