a review by Brett McCracken
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Writer and director – John Carney
Director of photography- Tim Fleming
Editor – Paul Mullen
Music – Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova
Production designer – Tamara Conboy
Producer – Martina Niland
Fox Searchlight Pictures. 88 minutes.
STARRING: Glen Hansard (the Guy) and Marketa Irglova (the Girl).
Rated R for language.
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Once is a strange and singular phenomenon. It’s an extremely low-budget indie from Ireland that defies genre label and is usually described as a “folk rock musical romance” or something. Its stars are unknown in the U.S., and yet if the hype already surrounding it is any measure, it looks like Once will be this summer’s Little Miss Sunshine (both films were distributed by Fox Searchlight, interestingly).
The story of Once (written and directed by John Carney) is wonderfully simple. A guy on a Dublin street strumming his guitar (Glen Hansard of the Dublin indie-folk band The Frames) attracts the attention of a girl on the street (Czech actress Markéta Irglová). Turns out she’s a piano player, and when they go to the back of a piano shop for a spontaneous jam session, we find out that they harmonize beautifully. The rest of the movie consists of the two drawing closer, as they gradually learn more about each other and make beautiful music together.
Unlike traditional movie musicals, Once does not feel artificial (i.e. characters do not break out in song as a substitute for conversation), and the songs make perfect sense in the context of the story. Fans of The Frames will be in heaven watching the film, and everyone else should warm to the folky, Damien Rice-esque style by the second or third song. By the end of the film (in which we witness an all night recording session and feel the exuberant payoff when the musicians first listen to the completed track in their car), you’ll want to buy the soundtrack.
But this movie is about far more than music, and this is where it transcends “cute novelty” and becomes something far more meaningful.
The title of Once should hint at what the film is really about: time, momentary experience, and fleeting human connection. Comparisons to films like Lost in Translation and Before Sunrise/Sunset are accurate in this sense. All of these films are about a guy and a girl who meet by chance in an alienating urban environment and share – for a time – a joyous mutuality that transcends everything beyond the scope of the here and now.
The lovely thing about this style of filmmaking – and Once exemplifies it – is that the plot unfolds in such a way that nothing is merely a stepping-stone to something else. The unobtrusive (though largely handheld) camera revels in the moment, quietly observing the magic of the everyday – whether it is Hansard repairing a Hoover vacuum (this is his day job), or searching desperately in the middle of the night for batteries to her archaic discman. The best moments, of course, are the delicate interactions between the two of them, when we feel the aching of love in its earliest stages, adorned by uncertainty and tempered by the restraint of not wanting to spoil something so pure. Perhaps the song most central to the film is the one Hansard and Irglová first perform together, which begins with Hansard singing: I don’t know you / but I want you / all the more for that.
There is something inexplicably sacred about the space this film inhabits – everything about it feels true, raw, incarnate. From the land of Ireland (green, grey, salty, ancient) to the working class, immigrant streets of Dublin (Irglová and her non-English-speaking mother live in a tiny apartment in a Czech neighborhood), there is a spare realism and cold, mundane beauty in each frame. A sunrise scene on the beach (which reminded me of the end of Lost in Translation and Before Sunrise) provides that great “morning after” mix of joy and emptiness which, in the end, is the spiritual terrain Once navigates.
Paul Schrader, in his book Transcendental Style in Film, defines the achievement of transcendence in film as a three-step process of 1) the meticulous representation of the “everyday” (the inexpressive banality which is “the bare threshold of existence”), 2) the introduction of disparity or conflict between man and his everyday environment (“if a human being can have true and tender feelings within an unfeeling environment …where do man’s feelings come from?”), and 3) a cathartic restoration of “stasis” which does not resolve the conflict but transcends it. Stasis is that feeling when you can accept the tension in life and – through it – witness the divine, “Wholly Other.”
Such an aesthetic of transcendence is demonstrated in many films (Schrader thought it best represented in the films of Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer), and Once is a perfect example of it. Here we have an everyday which is disrupted by the introduction of disparity – two people who awake to a longing and lacking through the introduction of the other. But the love they experience (if it is love) can only go so far in correcting their discontent. It is a temporary fix – albeit lovely, wonderful, truly once in a lifetime – which provides an answer of sorts, but only in the sense that it points to some other, greater Answer – the Transcendent.
Once, like Translation, derives its immense romantic satisfaction from precisely what doesn’t happen or isn’t there. The moments of connection in the film are made all the greater by the insatiable specter of impermanence which haunts our every moment. Like music, film is a temporal art. It is made up of artistic moments (images, sounds) that are here and then gone, in the blink of an eye. Every song which is performed live is only ever experienced “once,” and thus the musical motif of Once makes perfect sense. We can record these moments and revisit them (as the characters of this film do when they record a song together), but the original “now” of the moment is forever lost.
Brett McCracken writes film reviews for Relevant.
