Utterly sweet, very low budget, honest and also very limited.

Rating: 7/10 (14 November 2012)

Once (2006)
This has the best of cinema and worst of cinema. It's heartfelt and honest with a leading pair of actors who are as pure as snow in a world that is a blur around them. And it's also a slow tale filled with songs that start to sound the same and that's filmed without either panache or grit.
I went into this intending to love it. An Irish busker in Dublin falls in love with an immigrant single mom, and these two people who really are suited for each other try to find a way to make it work. Or if not quite try, they see that they are living in a moment of magic together and want it to stick. This movie is about that magic. Brief, beautiful, idealistic, and filled with some really good singing and songwriting.
That's what people love about this movie and why it has such a good following (and rating, if you pay attention to the starts). Watch it on that basis.
If you are looking at the film at all as a work of art, as a piece of collaboration between writer, actor, photographer, director, and so on, you're bound to feel it coming up short and shorter. As much as you love the main guy's utter kindness--a profoundly great model of kindness--you notice that things drag a bit, and that a few clichés appear, like the moment on the beach, meant to be lyrical happiness and it reads as meaning to be more than really conveying. And that songs start to be similar, and are even repeated.
On some level this is a huge music video, because most (most!) of the movie is made of songs set to various situations, and new situations are brought in so that new songs (or old ones) can be performed. It's easy to love the music but also get enough of it.
Another way to weigh all this out is to compare to a movie I saw recently at a festival, an equally low budget affair about a singer-songwriter looking for love and meaning, "I Am Not a Hipster." Now that is a truly inspired affair: complex, beautifully envisioned, off the beaten track. None of those descriptions apply to "Once."
But then, "Once" has one of the best bittersweet endings I've seen. It's the last five minutes that will mean the most. And maybe seem familiar, those things that mean so much that you don't quite keep. Except in your heart forever.