Once

How many chances do you get to meet the person you are supposed to spend the rest of your life with?

Once is a beautiful and understated film that is about that meeting. It's also about music and creativity and expression and cynics and romantics. The film stars two musicians, as opposed to trained actors. Glen Hansard is frontman for the Irish band The Frames. He recently moved to the Czech Republic and met fellow musician, Marketa Irglova. They were originally going to just write the songs for the movie, but the director decided to use their natural chemistry and cast them in the roles.

If you are a fan of music, watching this film is a moving experience. It's a joy to see the bond that forms between the two characters as they work on a song together. The film opens with Glen busking and promptly having someone try to snag what little money he has earned. We see him again that evening singing his own material. The tune he performs, just him and his battered guitar, gave me shivers. I wanted to clap, to cry, to sing along.

He meets a Czech immigrant and thanks to a bizarre series of questions they become friends. We find out he is still bitterly pining for an ex-girlfriend. Eventually, we find out she is separated from her husband and has a daughter. The relationship grows stronger as they work on music together (she sings and plays piano). It is obvious he wants to take it to the next level, but she is the pragmatic one and, even though she is falling for him, keeps him at a safe distance.

The music really propels the story. Thanks to my interests I've always been right at the edge of that sort of creativity and watching them work up songs made me miss that feeling of belonging you get in those moments. We hear songs from all sides of love and loss. There's a great moment when she is singing a song to him that she'd actually written for her husband. He doesn't know that at first and you can just see on his face how she touches him. She helps him get some money together to record a proper demo. The recording session makes up about the last fourth of the film and is full of amazing songs.

I won't tell you how it ends, only because I don't want to spoil it. But, I will say it is not your standard Hollywood ending. Like the rest of the movie, it is romantic and bittersweet all at once. I cried, but I was satisfied. You don't know for sure what is going to happen to them.

So maybe the answer to the question isn't once, but once and again.