John Carney: Once (2006)

[Chris Knipp]

John Carney: Once (2006)

Perfection doesn’t have to be perfect

Once is about a young Irish busker with a torn guitar and a raft of achingly felt songs about a girlfriend he lost the year before. He works in Dublin at his dad’s Hoover Repair Centre. One day as he’s playing on the street a Czech woman who sells roses and cleans houses comes up and starts to talk to him. She’s somewhat cool but she’s also disarmingly honest. The dialogue seems understated, offhand, but the words seem to come from the heart. She plays the piano (and later reveals she’s written some songs herself) and they get together to make music. Both are suffering from love affairs that went wrong. He longs for her but she keeps her distance. The simplicity of the acting makes the characters seem real, like everything else in the movie. It doesn’t try too hard. It trusts its material, and it works.

The recording session they wangle with a group of other buskers (two guitarists and a youthful drummer) is a metaphor for this whole film. These people know nothing about recording, but they’ve got good material and the initially skeptical engineer winds up acknowledging that they’ve made a beautiful thing.

Once’s transitions are a little awkward sometimes and its images aren’t fancy, but the story moves you without having any sentimental payoffs. Kitchen sink filmmaking: it works if you believe in what you’re doing. And have something to work with. The core of Once is the music. It’s what they have to work with. The studio recording session has the good feel of things coming together: it’s so strong and uncalculated-feeling, it makes the studio scene in Craig Brewer’s Hustle and Flow look self-conscious. In Once the sound of the music speaks without special need for dialogue or close-ups. The real love story of Once is the love of musicians playing together. Few movies perhaps have captured any better that warmth and pleasure of making music with others.

People have said this is a musical. If so, it redefines the musical as some American musicals have done recently, especially Spring Awakening and Passing Strange. What makes the idea fly is that it’s as if the young man and the young woman can’t express what they feel for each other, and the only way they can get their emotions across is to burst into song. But the songs are their songs, not some composer’s. It’s all perfectly organic.

Perfection, it turns out, doesn’t have to be perfect.

Starring Glen Hansard of The Frames and Marketa Irglova.

[mouton]

ONCE
Written and Directed by John Carney

“I don’t know you but I want you all the more for that.
Words fall through me and always fool me, and I can’t react.”

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 filmmaking. 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 filmmaking 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.

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[Chris Knipp]

Congratulations!

I appreciated all the background you added to my bare-bones statements about the film. I agree, criticism melts away.

[mouton]

Thanks, Chris. I love your analogy linking the inexperienced musicians during the recording process to the fimmakers themselves. The straight forward, no-frills filmmaking approach is somthing we both felt and commented on and while we seem to be singing Carney's praises, I can't help but feel it's a backhanded compliment as we are suggesting that the style is lacking. Let alone that it lends to the overall satisfaction of the experience, it is still being described as simple and inexperienced.

[Chris Knipp]

I hadn't really thought of it that way. I don't know whether he's experieced or inexperienced. You know more about them than I did. It's partly just low budget. But it is simple and economical. I think one of the reasons why I can't find fault with it is that it's unsentimental, even though the music has strong emotion.

[oscar jubis]

Exceedingly charming and well-observed film. Among my favorite scenes of any movie this year: the girl walking back from the convenience store wearing pajamas and a robe and singing "Falling Slowly". And the guy and the girl arranging "If You Want Me" at the music store.

2 Pet Peeves:

1) Films like this one getting an "R" rating because of a few "swear words" while nihilistic violent movies sometimes get the PG-13 rating.

2) Are film reviews meant to be read only after you've seen the film? I used to think one reason to read reviews is to help decide if one wants to watch the reviewed movie or not. I no longer read reviews before watching a movie. The first review I read when I got home from Once was Robert Wilonsky's Village Voice review which leaves no mystery unrevealed whatsoever and manages to say less of any interest than most other reviews I read. Then I came to Filmleaf and found mouton revealing that "she is still married to an estranged husband...". Why spoil the film (to some extent) by blurting out something revealed to "the guy" and the audience in the last 30 minutes of the movie? Alarmed by this development, I picked 10 additional reviews at random and was somewhat relieved to find that only 1 out of the 10 critics found it necessary to reveal the girl is married.