Once

A modern-day bohemian musical for the art-house set, Once doesn’t wear thin despite all its high-wire conceits. John Carney’s new film, winner of the World Cinema Audience Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, singlehandedly reinvents the tired musical genre for the DIY digital age by infusing the songs and the circumstances from which they arise with the naturalistic, long- take aesthetic that has become a form of low-budget orthodoxy, but the film’s generous spirit and unsentimental central relationship carry the day.

The story is beautiful in its simplicity. An unnamed street musician (Glen Hansard), his guitar and honey-smooth voice recalling the most enduring, least excessive elements of Brit-pop and Irish folk, meets cute with a Czech girl (Marketa Irglova) while performing outside a series of Dublin chain apparel stores. They run into each other again on the street, go for coffee, and a subtle attraction develops. She plays piano, and in the back of a music store they play one of his songs together in an unbroken eight-minute take that is just short of perfect.

Then complications arise. She is married to an older, money-obsessed Czech who remains in the east while she takes care of their child in one of Dublin’s Eastern European ghettos. He lives with his father, is suffering through a difficult break-up, and as the narrative begins is pondering a move to London to jumpstart his recording career and reunite with his girlfriend.

Ultimately, the two bond on a more platonic level, and she agrees to help him record an album over a raucous weekend in a backwater studio. They recruit a pair of street musicians and head into the studio as an inexperienced rag-tag band. The recording session goes well, and all that’s left for the narrative to discover is whether our pair are really meant for each other. But Carney cares more about being true to his characters than manipulating his audience, and this is where this romantic musical comedy departs from typical Hollywood fare. The filmmaker doesn’t feel the need to force his protagonists, who obviously have a lot to offer each other but whose circumstances are untenable, to ignore their desires and needs and embark upon a romantic ending that would violate the individuality and the messiness of working-class bohemian life that the picture has invested with such verisimilitude.

The film has an incredible energy that never dissipates despite the length of the shots or the drab textures of Tim Fleming HDV lensing. The beautiful songs never interrupt the film’s progress but flow naturally from it.  Once will never be a hit like Chicago or Dreamgirls, despite authenticity-starved audiences clamoring for something new and Fox Searchlight’s high hopes for the film; it will never reach the number of screens or secure the advertising budget to reach the audience in could. Nevertheless, the home-made feel of the picture, its lovely rock numbers, invest it   with a humanity that isn’t evident in the tawdry performances of pop stars moonlighting as screen actors. Once is a winner in every way.

                                                             Brandon Harris