Once

This indie film from Ireland, what so many Hollywood agents would call "a nice little film," blew me away the first time I saw it, and it blew me away even more tonight, watching it for the second time. So many things work on so many levels here.

• The music, of course, is wonderful.
  
• It's that rarest of breeds today, a moving love story without sex, yet retains much sensuality.
  
• It is beautifully filmed. And the film sequences are put to dramatic use, as when much of the story is told visually without dialog with a song in the background.
  
• It's title is perfect: some relationships, some moments, happen only once in an individual's life.
  
• The closing image is perfect, an angle from outside focusing on the young woman at her piano, an extraordinary gift from the guy, looking through a small open window in a large brick building, as if through the single passage to freedom in her brick prison of responsibility, back with her husband, but with music her salvation.
  

This is a remarkable achievement. Simple and brilliant.