It took me a while to get around to it, but last night Becky and I finally sat down to watch Once. I had a hard time finding it at the video store - I think they only stock maybe two copies on DVD. But it was worth the search.

Never heard of Once? It’s a rather obscure Irish film made back in 2006 for something less than $10,000. It’s a story about a guy who writes songs, who meets a girl on the street one day. She, too, is a musician, and over the course of a week they write and record several songs and along the way wrestle with ideas of love, commitment, family, and responsibility. It’s a musical of a sort; you get to hear seven or eight full-length songs sung during the movie, but they’re not in The Sound of Music-style musical narration - rather, they’re acoustic folk/rock songs (think Damien Rice for a comparison) that the pair is writing. And while the film started off obscure, don’t expect it to stay that way. It’s garnered quite an obsessive following due not in the least to the fantastic soundtrack. Oh, and that award from the Sundance film festival and that Oscar nomination won’t hurt it, either.

So why does this film work so well?

First, the actors aren’t experienced actors - the male lead (Glen Hansard of the Irish band The Frames) has only been in one picture before this, and this is the female lead (Marketa Irglova)’s first film. But they are musicians, and in my experience films about musicians that actually star musicians seem to do better. The fact that Hansard and Irglova teamed up to write all the original music for the movie amazes me even more.

Second, the story is real. We can all repeat the cliched chick-flick plot basically in our sleep, right? There’s the guy, and the girl, and her friend, and his friend. There’s the initial meeting, the I-think-I-love-you scene, the crisis where everything looks lost, and then the glowing finale. When you watch Once, forget the cliches. The guy writes songs which he sings on the streetcorner. He moved back in with his dad after his mom died and works at the family business fixing vacuum cleaners. She’s a Czech immigrant who cleans houses, and, without revealing too much, has family entanglements as well. They meet. They interact. They wrestle with their feelings. It feels right.

And the music is so good. The headline song (Falling Slowly) is nominated for an Oscar and certainly should be the favorite. The rest of the soundtrack is nearly equal in quality. The songs will stand by themselves even if you haven’t seen the movie… but watch the movie. It got an R-rating because of the Irish predilection of casually using the F-bomb as an adjective and interjection. Even that, though, is pretty much limited to a couple of scenes. The film as a whole, though, is a beautiful, beautiful work of art. You can have your Hollywood blockbusters. I’ll take this little Irish gem any day.