A breath of fresh air

Rating: 10/10 (12 June 2007)

It's hard to put into words why I loved this movie so much. Taking apart each element, there isn't much that you could say was really notable. It was a low budget movie, and it looked it. The sound was fair to middling. The camera was jerky. The acting was fair. And the music was decent.
But what a movie does well, when it does it well, is to combine all these elements to make an experience that exceeds the sum of its parts. Every once in a while, a movie does that so well, that at the end, you realize that you saw something completely new - something that moved you - something that may have had elements you've seen elsewhere, but never quite in this way. That is what "Once" has accomplished.
The story told in words is incredibly restrained. There is really not much drama to it. The drama, and the emotion is mostly in the songs. As the story fills out with this interplay of speaking and singing, we become a voyeur to a unlikely love story whose subtlety is a delight to behold. In this context the songs become beautiful and evocative and the actors become real people whose lives we care about well after we leave the theater.