Does this look familiar? Yep, she's a newspaper girl for the Herald Tribune.

This Irish love story is as joyfully goofy as it gets. Roddy Doyle, author of The Commitments and The Snapper,turns in his first screenplay, and it's a riot. If you come from the Angela's Ashes school of what it means to be Irish - poverty, famine, drunkards, eight hungry children - this film will surprise you. Brendan and Trudy have more spark than any couple you'll find on screen right now.

Brendan (Peter McDonald) is a lonely, stiff high-school teacher who loves movies and sings hymns in the choir (all Irishmen sing; that's a fact.) Brendan's lonely days are over, it seems, when a spunky shorthaired girl called Trudy (Flora Montgomery) hits him up at the local pub. Brendan invites her out, and overjoyed, he declares at the family gathering: "I am going to see an important Polish film -- with a girl!"

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But anybody with half the film-education Brendan boasts should know that spunky short-haired girls are fickle, and that Brendan, a man who is never without a tie, is in for tumultuous times. Trudy is the kind of girl who makes men dance in public and forces them to sing at parties, and once their relationship kicks off, she has a hearty laugh at Brendan's orgasms. And that's before he figures out why exactly Trudy sneaks out of bed every night in a ski mask....

It's not really the story, though, that makes When Brendan Met Trudy such unadulterated fun; it's the giddiness that permeates the entire film. Roddy Doyle was having some serious fun writing this movie, and it shows in the smallest of details: quick pot shots at Ireland on the TV news, movie theaters that show movies actually entitled "The Usual Shite," and a great recurring gag involving a Japanese Tamagochi pocket pet.

The film is also chock-a-block with film references, starting with the opening shot of Brendan face down in the gutter, lifted from Sunset Boulevard, to an absolutely hilarious subtitled A Bout de Souffle sequence. If you're not conversant in visual quotations, don't worry: When Brendan is generous enough to show clips from the referenced movies to let everybody in on the jokes.

With all the gleeful risks it takes, "When Brendan" often teeters on the edge of utter silliness, but somehow it never falls. I was laughing so hard, I was squarely in Mr. Doyle's camp and rooting for his wacky characters - I would have forgiven him anything.

Down to the spoofy end titles, "When Brendan met Trudy" is pure delight, a film that skips by with weightless, lively grace. In a season where lame Farelly knock-offs of decidedly unfunny romantic comedies are flooding the theaters, it's a joy to see a love story that doesn't need fart jokes to be funny and fresh. Whether or not you have a Trudy or Brendan to take along or you have to go alone, this is one is better than any important Polish film, and it's worlds ahead of "The Usual Shite."