“I dedicate this story to all those who, having chosen their path by feeling, have decided to live it in all innocence... to all those people who are deemed inappropriate, asking them to forgive me if this film does not suit them.”
 
Paul Vecchiali conceived Once More as a series of sequence shots of up to eleven minutes in length, each set on the same day across ten years, from 1978 to 1988. The film would tell the story of Louis (Jean-Louis Rolland), a depressed, middle-aged family man, who decides to leave his wife and pursue his attraction to men. What’s more, the film would be a musical.
 
Realising this plan would take all the expertise and ingenuity the “machine” (as Vecchiali called it) of Diagonale had accumulated. Vecchiali turned to long-time director of photography Georges Strouvé and “the undisputed master of live sound” Jacques Bonfanti. Principal photography lasted just ten days, with each sequence shot rehearsed for six to seven hours before shooting commenced.
 
In the hands of another director, such an endeavour might end up a shallow, virtuosic gimmick. But Once More is a truly layered work, a searching examination of the dialectics of freedom and constraint, of creation and destruction, that shape a life of desire. Confronting social realities — it was the first French film to depict the AIDS crisis — with a form that drew on the work of Jean Grémillon, Max Ophüls and Jacques Demy, Once More is perhaps the crowning achievement of both Vecchiali and Diagonale.