Movie City Indie

In John Carney’s limber long-player, several songs suggest a life, a small, wonderful world consisting of a few Dublin haunts where an unnamed street corner performer, or “busker,” (Glen Hansard) and an unnamed younger woman (Markéta Irglová) with a winsome command of English, meet, tease, learn, but mostly with eyes wide open develop a mature relationship deepened by the dance of several songs, including the gorgeous “Slowly Falling,” which the extremely affable and charming pair convincingly “compose” in front of us in an early scene.

In standard narrative terms, Once is the slightest of artifacts, and yet it is filled a quiet integrity and charm and it offers lessons in how simply a tale can be told. Shot in two weeks in unprepossessingly grungy Mini-DV, it is a grand, effortless Irish musical povera (shot in two weeks for aboutu 100,000 euro), written and directed by Carney, who was for several years in the fine band, The Frames, with star-composer Glen Hansard. (An NPR commentator memorably dubbed Hansard “a longtime master of sublimely melodramatic sad-bastard music.”) Carney work some very sophisticated insights about the representation of music on film and also how one walks, talks, lives, breathes, stumbles, fumbles, triumphs, while trying to fashion any form of art. Layers peel away, their preconceptions of each other (and ours of them) fall away, and Hansard’s music, as urgent and lovely as ever, grows in collaboration with someone who turns out not only to be a classical pianist, but a good lyricist and a fine singer. The film’s clarity about the happenstance of fruitful collaboration is rare. (In the real world, Hansard and Irglová had already written and performed together.)

There’s a whiff of the succinct bittersweetness of David Lean’s Brief Encounter, a sing-a-long (in Hansard’s own gaff) hints at James Joyce’s short story, “The Dead,” and the place of the young Czech woman in contemporary Ireland suggests the change in the Irish mindset after the “Celtic Tiger,” or vast economic boom that began in the 1990s. But that is not text, those are smart, lovely undercurrents: text in the tale is moments, moments such as the look on The Guy’s face when he catches the disappointment on the Girl’s face after a clumsy, presumptuous pass.

Like with a song, each listener invests a different measure of heart and hopes in this boy-meets-girl perplex, the pair birth a song, they bond beyond romance that’s the clothesline for their ample charm. There’s nothing oblique, only merely suggestive, like lyrics. Songs are omnipresent in movies, filmmakers are constantly plying the power of music.

But the portrayal of music hardly ever works on screen. Why? Do you have a CD player, an iPod? You swim and surface in a sea of song by day and night. You walk the walk, hope in your head, song in your ears, going slowly deaf perhaps, but the narrative of your waking consciousness is scored, and you would not give that up for the world. You walk through this movie, not once, but every sunny hopeful moment you listen to music, shuffling faster toward the horizon line.

Even essential French film theorist Andre Bazin would likely have embraced this small wonder: he believed the long take and documentary-style elements suggested a greater truth than editing. You, dear reader, could have made this movie. (Carney told me that Once should look like anyone’s home videos posted to YouTube.)

The music under the final scenes is a reprise of a song called “When Your Mind’s Made Up.” We’ve heard it before. We’ve been there. We’re here. It packs an immense wallop: this is how pop works; this is how songs happen in our lives. It is a man’s voice, then a woman’s voice, in harmony, where the singers (and listeners) can but smile. This is the look (and sound) of love—heartfelt, unabashed, and ultimately at farthest remove from the saccharine that is sentimentality.

Kurt Vonnegut famously remarked that music was proof of the existence of God. Once, to me, is proof of the potential of movies, and proof of love and friendship and creative bonds, of more life in the time that we have, in a life that can grow beyond boundaries. Once adds 200 locations on June 8. [
Ray Pride. Photo (c) 2007 Ray Pride.]