Yeah . . . that was us. Lots of us in the cinema were no longer young and came out with smiles on our faces. But hey . . . a person's heart doesn't shrivel up like an old apple just because of the passing years.

And not just people of all ages but all kinds of people love the film. I happened to be in Roundstone, Connemara a little while after Once was shown there this year and that smile was still smacked on the most unlikely local faces, including the faces of people who wouldn't, frankly, know one band from another.

Another chatroom contributor remarked:

"If you told me that one of the best movies of the year is a movie that cost 120K shot badly on DV that's also a musical I'd trust you as far as I could throw you. But that's what this movie is. If you can't get laid after bringing a date to this, you never willf" Well, I don't know how you'd run a scientific test of that last assertion. But if it is a way of saying that this is a movie which can soften and disarm a viewer and make him or her believe in love again, then that's how it seemed to me, too.

And the interesting thing about it is that it's not a movie about falling in love. Quite the opposite. The main characters have unfinished business which is more pressing than the near . . . very near . . . possibility of love between them. They're not that young . . . or at least the Glen Hansard character isn't . . . and the girl has a child. They are not kids. They have, in fact, responsibilities.

But it is a movie about the transformations usually attributed to falling in love.

Such as an excess of energy. A run of luck.

The awakening of hope.

The impulse to turn back to an abandoned relationship to try to handle it better.

And it is about the coming of inspiration.

The girl/muse in Once is . . . and has to be . . . a foreigner: muses are never the girl next door.

She comes from afar and sees the street singer new, as no one else sees him, and, trailing her hoover, she leads him to the place where he can be inspired. The climax of the story is not what they decide about each other and their former partners; it is the furious weekend of creativity that leads to the CD they record.

This is the one point where I fear the influence of a film, otherwise so sane, on the many, many young people who believe their garage bands will some day make it. The rest of this movie isn't a fairytale . . . apart from the bank manager, the loving, hoover-mending father and the loving, childminding Czech mother. But it is a fairytale that a scratch street band could make the music the one in this movie does.

It is, isn't it?

Would the film work as well if it was about some art other than music? I don't think so.

It is a long time now since it became evident that the choice of music and musicians has supplanted even clothes, never mind books, in the self-defining of young people. It is, as it were, the one thing they wouldn't lie about.

And by the same token, it is believed in contemporary culture that what singer-songwriter-instrumentalists like the man and woman in the movie say in their music is sincere. That is what gives Once . . . a story in song . . . a resonance that the classic musicals don't have. In them, the songs blatantly illustrate a fiction. When Glen Hansard stands on Grafton Street in the middle of the night and sings, he is setting up the story, just as 'O What a Beautiful Morning!' sets up Oklahoma! or 'Wouldn't it be Loverly?' sets up My Fair Lady. But what he is belting and wailing out is his self-consciousness. It is his condition he is articulating . . . as poems articulate the condition of lyric poets. And when he and the girl communicate through their songs they're not performing. They believe they are and they're believed by a contemporary audience to be at the most serious level of the attempt of human beings to communicate with each other.

There's the unspoken message, too, that music hath powers to soothe the savage breast. No one in the story thinks making this kind of music is a waste of time . In fact . . .

as in the bank manager and the whoever-it-is who gives the buskers dinner and drinks . . .

music brings out the best in everyone around. And the couple themselves . . . Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova . . . simply breathe sweetness. They're luminous.

They're the best bit of casting for years. And so are all the bit parts . . . the fockin' druggie who steals the money, the guy who plays only Lizzy, the quiet Da, the bored recording engineer, the drummer who was never in a recording studio before.

If the Irish Film Board and RTE in its filmbacking role exist not so much to finance successful dramas as to finance drama so that something as lively and intelligent as this can be successful, then they're doing a great job. It is a pleasure to say it.