Once

• Genre : Drama, Music, Romance...
• Running time : 85 min.
• Director : John Carney
  
• Studio : Bórd Scannán na hÉireann
  
• Writer : John Carney
  
• Cast : Glen Hansard, Markéta Irglová, Hugh Walsh, Gerard Hendrick, Alaistair Foley, Geoff Minogue..
  

From the moment ONCE begins, it is clear that the experience about to be had is unlike any you've had before. A busker sings for his dollar in the street. The quality of the image is grainy; the steadiness of the camera is shaky at best. The day turns into night and the song goes from bright to dark. The passion with which it is sung is almost overwhelming and suddenly borders on off putting. From the manner in which the busker is framed, it isn't clear whether anyone is there to hear his song but his fervor brushes skepticism aside and declares that the song itself and the satisfaction derived from singing it, outweigh the importance of having someone hear it. But someone is listening after all. A young woman from the Czech Republic stands transfixed before our busker on this Dublin street and a spark ignites the flame that gives ONCE its warmth. Writer/Director, John Carney, removes all convention from the movie musical and creates a film that reads like a well-written love song about two musicians falling in love with each other and the music they create together.

In the early 90's, Carney left his rock group, The Frames, to pursue a career in film-making. The Frames continued on without him and new lead singer, Glen Hansard, eventually took leave to search out new musical ventures, moving from Dublin to the Czech Republic. Here he met Marketa Irglova, a classically trained pianist, and they developed a project entitled The Swell Season. Though the two are not linked romantically, their meeting and the music that came out of that became Carney's inspiration for ONCE. During the week that follows their initial meeting on the street, the two artists who are never referred to by name in the film, learn to accept that they are inexplicably drawn to each other. Given the chance, a relationship between the two could become one that would help each other grow. He would make a great father figure to her young child and she would drive him to make something of himself. Though ONCE's tone is simple, these two characters' lives are not. He has a girlfriend in London he longs to be with but feels he cannot out of obligation to his father in Dublin, while she is still married to an estranged husband whom she is unsure she has a future with. The trick then becomes to remain in the moment with each other and never allow for their relationship to go where it naturally feels it should.



Albeit a modern approach to a movie musical, ONCE is not so modern that it leaves the music behind. Instead the music becomes the catalyst for love. She is first drawn to him by the sound of his song. He sings it with such passion that it gives her a direct view of his soul. It is not all who are able to show such vulnerability yet when the song ends, he trips over his spoken words and nothing comes out as it should. At first, she almost seems a nuisance to him. It isn't until he hears the beautiful music she can make with her hands that the glimpse of her soul captures all his attention. Theirs is a mating ritual carried out in song. When one sings or plays, the other listens. When one cannot express the proper sentiment in words, it is music that gets the point across. When the two find themselves alone in a local musical instrument shop, they learn what it means to sing together. In order to do so, they must truly listen to the sound of the other's voice and fall into the same pace and rhythm of their notes. Their voices, as it turns out, are the perfect compliment to each other. The harmony they create leads into a song that is itself a representation of the love between them, both fragile and pure.

The delicate chemistry between Hansard and Irglova is framed in such a stripped fashion that it only further serves to concretize the genuine sincerity between the two. Almost entirely hand held and lit only with natural light, ONCE seems less like intricate film-making and more like layered storytelling, or perhaps more appropriately, song writing. Put simply, ONCE is like a perfectly soft song played acoustically in a park; it seeps into your soul, soothing you as the sun beats down upon your smiling face, allowing for all cynicism to melt away while your reaffirmed belief in love is sung from your mouth.



Once is definitely a musical above anything else. Half of this film takes place with songs either being sung in real time or being played over a montage sequence. Rather than use the words of the music to tell the story, writer/director John Carney uses them to set-up the emotional core and existence for our two leads. The words they sing are meaningful to their characters and how they react after uttering the lyrics can be both joyous and heartbreaking. He must be credited with having the guts to stage many musical moments in single takes, letting the performances and the music take over the scene. To go from the sheer happiness of laying down a track in the studio, to the sorrow-filled moment of Irglová unable to finish singing the song she wrote for her old love, back to the comradery of finishing their demo is a roller-coaster of emotions that sum up the whole film completely. There is not a misstep in sight. From the fateful meeting at our start to the bittersweet perfection that is the final scene, you don't get many opportunities to see original work like this in cinema anymore.

What bitter sweetness this film stirs within the deepest bowels of any viewer! And how startling it is that such a small, miniscule piece of work that stirs such emotions, that big, bloated epics many times fail to stir? Production value is low but the almost documentary-style film-making only adds to the realism. The movie was shot mostly on video and with many extended, uncut long takes quite unlike the complex, operatic set-ups we've seen in the films of Martin Scorsese and more recently in Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men, but rather simple, static shots simple depicting our two characters interacting. Most of the film is just that – the two characters interacting – but such incredible depth of emotion derives from these interactions that it is truly inspirational. The filmmakers' and actors' capturing of total and utter realism is so convincing, that the film might as well be a documentary feature about two music lovers, following them from their chance encounter and throughout the course of a whirlwind, impulsive week of music-making. But what's truly remarkable is the emotional rainbow this documentation provides.



The key word in this film is simplicity. The plot is as simple as it gets – a chance meeting and a week of music making. Production value is almost non-existent and the cinematography is obviously simplistic and minimalist – except for one set-up involving a crane, which seemed a little out of place for my taste. The acting is extremely minimalist and realistic; we sort of get the feeling that our two stars are very much like the characters they play in real life, much like the same feelings evoked from Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise/Before Sunset, in which we know Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy donate so much of themselves into their characters.

Many people have labeled this film as a modern-day musical. Well, at first I resented this statement, as all of the music in the movie is performed on-screen within the context of the film. We don't see any breaking out into song-and-dance in this film; it is all the real, actual music these two people are making on-screen and in real time. But later on I thought about it a bit, and eventually reached a conclusion that may explain why people describe the movie so. In the classic movie musicals, the songs all deal with advancing and portraying the plot. In Once, though, there is a twist: Since there isn't actually much of a plot to talk about (although the characters DO have a well-rounded arc), the songs all deal with advancing and portraying the characters' emotional states. Listen to the broken-ness of Hansard's earlier songs written about his girlfriend in London. Or to the sad longing of the lyrics Irglová writes to Hansard's as-yet-unwritten melody that he leaves her on a CD player.



If the songs pack a big emotional punch, the rest of the movie packs a much more subtle emotional resonance. I think this may just be one of the saddest, truest and most beautiful cinematic depictions of platonic and entirely unrequited love. Many people have said that they left this film with feelings of elation and levity. I myself found the ending extremely melancholy. It's great that both of our characters at least try to get back together with there long lost loves, but it is sad that they don't get to see each-other for one last time. It is sad to think that even if the Guy goes back to London, he may not be able to mend the wounds with his girlfriend. It is sad to think that if the Girl couldn't get along with her husband the first time, chances are that the same troubles will arise the second time around. It is sad to think that if Hansard isn't himself a stadium-filling musician in real life, his character in the movie probably also won't be one. And it is great, of course, that the film ends where it does, in their parting, and doesn't linger on what happens after the Guy arrives in London and submits his demo tape, for example. The film begins and ends in the relationship between the two people and leaves it at that. But how sad it is that when the Guy asks the girl if she loves her husband, she replies in Czech so that he won't understand "no, I love you." And it is saddest to think that all the beautiful, happy and good things that happen in the film can happen only once in a lifetime. As the film's tagline says: How often do you find the right person? The answer lies in the film's title: Once. Many other questions can be asked: How often do you get a chance to go from being a Dublin busker to recording a professional demo tape? How often do you get a loan from a bank teller that just happens to have a passion for what you're trying to get a loan for? How often do you get to secretly rip off your father's beloved motorcycle for the day? The answer to all the questions: Once.

Shot on a shoestring budget, it's films like these that promise a very promising future indeed for independent foreign film. Devoid of the weights carried by Hollywood productions and the need to contradict those weights fulfilled by American independent film, the independent cinema of the world is free to draw inspiration from whatever source it requires, be it the human psyche, random surrealism or Irish folk music. Once in particular succeeds so admirably in all its fields not only because of the stunningly beautiful music it features, but also because of the simplicity and the anonymity of its characters and events. Can this happen to anyone? Yes. How many times can it happen? Once.

My Rating

Once : 8.4/10