Once

Once is a thing of beauty. In what’s truly one of the more brilliant ideas in recent cinema history, writer/director John Carney has revitalized the movie musical and restructured it to suit the current indie rock generation. Rather than delivering a stagy, elaborate production, he has stripped the genre of all its cliché and its formula. Shot on location with primarily handheld camerawork, this is as low key authentic as it gets. The music emerges organically from scene to scene with most of the original audio preserved and very little of the traditional dubbing that goes on in bigger budgeted, heavily choreographed musical productions. It takes the fly on the wall indie flick and adds a new, unbelievably captivating musical twist.

Irish rock Glenn Hansard of the band The Frames stars as an unnamed street performer who spends his days fixing vacuums and his nights playing lonely acoustic love songs on the streets of Dublin hoping against hope for some generous donations. One night he meets a captivating woman (Marketa Irglova, also unnamed in the film) who admires his music. She’s working the streets as well, selling flowers and whatever else she can affordably peddle. As it turns out, she too is a musician, and together they start to write songs and perform for one another. Their relationship is constantly straddling the line between friendship and romance with each person bringing their own baggage in to complicate the situation. Thankfully, baggage here is not just boring exposition. You can discover everything you need to know about the characters through the content of their songs. In one truly lovely scene, the woman asks him what went wrong with his old girlfriend and he begins to improvise a song on his guitar as if the truth were impossible to speak but exhilarating to play. So much here is sung instead of spoken. It’s precisely what a musical should be. The deepest emotions and darkest revelations of the narrative all come through songs. There’s a true awareness of the way in which these two artists hide within their material and a very strong argument made for their relationship based on the simple fact that they understand the power of each other’s music. Their musical collaboration begets emotional entanglement and soon the story and the music become so deeply intertwined that we’re left experiencing both as one in the same.

There’s not much plot here, but there doesn’t need to be. It’s a film closest to meandering dialogue love stories like Before Sunrise and its sequel, Before Sunset. The satisfying reversal being that rather than relying on carefully crafted dialogue to further the emotional bond between the two leads, we get an extremely beautiful collection of songs that express the characters’ emotions as eloquently, or maybe more so, than film’s most brilliantly gifted screenwriter ever could. The relationship formed here and the songs it produces feel as true and earnest as on any screen coupling. This is a magnificent film.

Grade: A