COLM Toibin wrote a novel. Nick Hornby adapted it into a screenplay. John Crowley directed the film. Those preparations, given life by a fine cast, result in a lovely film accomplished in a cinematic style fondly reminiscent of its era.

In the 1950s, Eilis, intelligent, hard-working in the bakery-cum-deli in a small Irish town, devoted to her younger sister Rose and her widowed mother, has made a seminal decision, to make a new life across the Atlantic. She settles and finds work in Brooklyn.

The young ladies in Mrs Keogh’s boarding house have 9-to-5 jobs and go dancing in the parish hall, where Eilis, studying bookkeeping at night, intending later to study accountancy, meets Italian plumber Tony whose family welcomes her.

Their relationship is gentle, cautious, polite, on the brink of passion rather than diving into its depths. They marry without fuss in a registry office. Eilis goes back to see her mother after Rose dies. There she meets Jim who would sweep her off her feet if she allowed it. Nobody in Ireland knows that she already has a husband. The risks she faces in keeping the secret dominate Act 3 of the plot.

Saoirse Ronan’s pale beauty as Eilis hides an admirable inner strength. Emory Cohen brings determination and respectability to Tony. Domhnall Gleeson as Jim would be as good for Eilis as Tony is but doesn’t know how the dice are loaded against him. Julie Walters has great comic lines presiding over the boarding house dinner table and Jim Broadbent is the reliable, conscientious parish priest.

“Brooklyn” is a strong contender at the coming Oscars. Nothing in its making detracts from its gentle power and charm.

At Palace Electric, Dendy, Event Cinemas from February 11.