The .Plan

When you are on a 12-hour plane ride, the last thing you want to do is watch something serious. Bring on the brain-numbing “Pirates of the Caribbean 3″, “Die Hard 4″, and “Harry Potter 5″ instead. It has been years since I’ve deliberately watched a movie like this; even romantic comedies have been discarded (and that time KJ made us watch “Hitch” doesn’t count; I was just too tired to get up from the couch).

But “Once” catches you by surprise.

He works in his father’s vacuum cleaner repair shop by day, singing himself hoarse over his battered guitar in the evenings for spare change, trying to forget about the woman who broke his heart and left him for another man.

She sells flowers in the street, works as a maid when she can find work, and is trying to make sense of her life with her two year-old daughter after her husband left them.

When they meet, their interactions are awkward. It is clear they have nearly nothing in common besides their common ability to wail their repressed feelings through music. But maybe that’s all that matters — this one non-negotiable — and that gives you all the more reason to be drawn in to notice everything about their aching romance: the first ‘no’, the first disclosure, the first time she cries on his shoulder.

When she listens to him play one of his original songs, adds the background keyboard, and then tentatively joins him in harmony, it may as well be a first kiss.

Take this sinking buoy
and point it home
we’ve still got time

Neither he nor she are even given names in the movie. When, in part due to her insistent prodding, he finally gets around to recording a demo, they invite some random guys off the street — nobodys who are also not given names. The signature song starts off as a nondescript whisper, and the jerk sound engineer (the only guy in the movie who does get a name) is talking on the phone in the sound booth to his girlfriend complaining about how he’s stuck in the studio for the weekend making a CD for some “losers”.

And then the drums kick in. You start experiencing goosebumps when you realize this is the understated climax of the movie — and at that moment the sound engineer also begins to realize the beauty in what they are creating in the studio, perks up, and starts making adjustments on the mixer.

So
if you want something
and you call, call
then I’ll come running
to fight
and I’ll be at your door
when there’s nothing worth running for

“Once” is a wistful film. Easily the best movie I’ve seen this year.