ONCE ***1/2

Director: John Carney
Guy: Glen Hansard
Girl: Marketa Irglova

Every once in a while a movie comes along which makes you feel that you’re falling in love at the same time as the leads do―and you are because you’re falling in love with the characters. Once is one of those films. Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova create music together, literally and figuratively. Both actors do an astonishing job of bringing their characters to life, despite not being full-time actors. On one level, the film is a meditation on how chance encounters can change your life, and, on another, it’s a musical without cheesy dance routines.

Hansard, who you might remember from The Commitments, plays a street musician who also works in a vacuum repair shop owned by his father. One day, Irglova chats him up during a performance. It turns out that she needs her vacuum repaired, and this allows the two to continue talking, becoming romantic-interested friends.

John Carney directs this film with a firm grasp of how to let the emotional attachment between the main characters―and your attachment to them―grow organically. When Hansard tells Irglova about his old girlfriend, he does so with accompanying chords from his ever-present guitar; he sings the story of being cheated on, using his music as a support system, a way to protect himself. The scene is a tender moment in a sweet film.

Once is simple, but elegant. There is a plot―Hansard takes his music in a professional direction, something he is able to accomplish through his friendship with Irglova―but that takes backseat to the feel of the film, the wonderful poetic quality of a David Gordon Green film.

Carney has created a film that will involve you emotionally throughout, but, more importantly, a film that lingers with you afterwards: the sign of any film that can affect your life. This should not be missed.