The Way You Make Me Feel

Every once in a while, I'll see a movie that makes me reexamine how I see movies. I think these are invaluable, because it's so easy to feel you've seen it all and can't be surprised.

The most recent movie that forced me to get over my assumptions and actually pay attention, is the Irish film Once. The music in the film is phenomenal, but what I'm most interested in is how the movie both is, and isn't, a romantic comedy... and how it refuses to play by the rules of rom-com convention. Here are a couple of examples:

• In the film, the guy's still pining over a girl who left him. In a conventional rom-com, the guy's supposed to get over that absent girl, and start anew with the gal who enters his life in the first act of the movie. Instead, Once lets him pine for the absent girl -- going so far as to have him writing a song while watching old home videos of her -- and then allows for the idea that perhaps he and absent girl still have a chance!
  
  
• Similarly, the gal in this film has an absent husband in another country. She, her mom, and her little girl moved to Ireland for a fresh start. Our first instinct, as viewers of many rom-coms, is that the dad is a deadbeat, or was at least a romantic mistake, and the gal is supposed to start anew with our heartbroken guy. Instead, the gal, after the experience of making music and becoming close to our musician guy, decides maybe the right thing to do is invite her kid's dad here to live with them, and give being a family another chance.

Now, in neither this example or the one above were we given strong evidence that our heroes should move on, and leave these past loves behind... it is simply our assumption that that is the case, because of how these movies "usually work".

And, of course, there's the ending. Which is perfect, surprising, and sublime, and because I've already spoiled too much, I won't spoil that. But suffice it to say, sometimes it is most satisfying to not get what you, as a viewer, think you want.