Once
Directed by John Carney
Once is a deceptively accomplished piece of work. Even though it has the slapdash feel of a student film, Once is actually a remarkably innovative effort to redefine the movie musical. But that’s not what accounts for Once‘s offhanded but still immensely potent sweetness.
Two Dubliners meet, get to know each other a bit and, almost without realizing it, change each other’s lives for the better. Along the way they sing songs, write songs, and spend a weekend in a recording studio. They are both kind and decent people and their relationship–more than a friendship, not really a love affair–is a godsend for both of them.
There’s really nothing more touching in cinema than watching honorable people behave honorably, and being treated honorably in return. Once overflows with these grace notes.
During the day, a Dublin street musician (we never learn his name) plays a guitar so old and bruised that it is literally worn through. He sings popular songs for money during the day and performs his own material at night–raw, wounded, and beautiful songs about love and loss sung in a voice that rises from a gravelly baritone to a soaring falsetto. He is played by a little-known Irish rocker named Glen Hansard, who isn’t going to be little-known much longer.
As dusk falls, a pretty girl (we’re not told her name, either) with a Middle European accent walks through the street mall selling flowers. She stops by, listens, and asks if he wrote the song for someone. Yes, he says, for a woman in London who cheated on him. Sing that for her, she says, and you’ll get her back.
He works at and lives above his father’s vacuum repair shop. She brings him a vacuum to fix, and on the bus ride back to the shop, he improvises a country song called “Broken Hearted Hoover Fixer Sucker Guy.”
Everywhere they go, they make music together. She takes him to a piano shop whose proprietor lets her play during lunch hour. He gives her a chart of a song called “Falling Slowly” and they harmonize perfectly. He is finding it hard to write lyrics these days and asks if she would like to collaborate.
Listening to a CD of his music, she writes words in a dark room in a dingy apartment with her infant daughter asleep next to her. She is Czech, and has come to Dublin with her mother and without her husband, who does not appreciate her. Her Walkman runs out of batteries, and she goes to a store at midnight in her pajamas to buy more.
As she walks the four blocks home, she sings the song she has just written. Cars pass by, people sit on stoops, roller skaters move in and out of frame. Writer-director John Carney films the scene in two understated but bravura takes. An angelic teenager named Markéta Irglová, who plays the girl, grows ever more beatific as she sings in a high and breathy voice. And for a moment, the dim Dublin street seems almost like the drenched Hollywood soundstage on which Gene Kelly danced “Singin’ in the Rain.”
Once doesn’t have much of a plot. The guitarist makes a pass at the girl. She rebuffs him and he apologizes. She knows he’s in love with someone else. He knows she’s married. The movie’s conceit is that they have something deeper than love between them. Each is a muse for the other. She gives him the energy and enthusiasm to record his songs and try to make a life for himself as a professional musician. He brings her back to music, which makes her feel alive and young and free.
They treat each other with respect. And the people they encounter do so as well. The guitarist’s depressed father surges to life listening to his music. A banker whom they approach for a small-business loan takes out a guitar and sings his songs for them. A sound engineer at the studio they rent scoffs at their amateurishness until he gives a listen to the first song they record–and then he becomes an ardent helpmeet for them.
I don’t want to overburden or overpraise Once. It’s a slight thing, a mood piece. But it is an achievement. Once is the visual and aural equivalent of an experience once common to people of a certain age: listening to an album on a scratchy, third-rate turntable by a recording artist of whom you’ve never heard who catches your attention, holds it, and so excites you that by the time the needle reaches the end of Side One, you can barely wait to pull the album up and flip it over for Side Two.
John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
