What a stunning surprise!

Rating: 9/10 (15 June 2008)

I saw this film tonight in a cinema near home, expecting to see the umpteen interesting independent film.
It's just amazing. Not one of those unbelievable love stories that are the stuff blockbusters are made of, but something real. Nobody meets nobody in the street. Are you "nobody", too? Then, there are two of us! He works at a hoover repair shop in Dublin, Ireland, and is a busker in the spare time, playing "the songs people know" by day in order to make some money and the songs he himself writes by night. She's an immigrant from the Czech Republic, a single mother living with her own mother, the daughter of a suicidal violinist, trying to make ends meet by peddling flowers in the streets and working as a housemaid. They meet each other, they start talking; or rather, they start playing and singing in this strange, original musical. In the end, they go their separate ways (or do they?) without having even kissed, let alone having had sex, and yet having been aware of the feelings for one another that have grown in them. Actually I think the woman does tell the guy "I love you", but in Czech: he doesn't understand, and she probably doesn't want him to understand her. "Alone, and yet together like two passing ships", as a song by Canadian rock band Rush has it.
A moving, extremely romantic, yet deeply realistic film; and not rhetorical at all. How many times so many of us have felt so close with someone else, sometimes someone we have met by chance, someone we never expected we would meet, and yet nothing happens? But, deep inside, we know it has. And yet, rather sadly, it hasn't.
The director must be a great music lover: it shows. Music is the fabric that weaves the whole film together.
My favourite scene is the one where they both go to a bank in order to get a loan. As a bank employee specialised in loans (but I'm no manager) I can relate to that. There's genius in that scene.
But what stuns me the most, was to find out that this is not a new release: it is as many as two years old, and yet it shows in cinemas here in Italy only now, thanks to well-known director's Nanni Moretti distribution firm Sacher.
This film is a jewel, a rare pearl.
Do not miss it if you can: take it from me, you will not regret it.