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 At First Sight "Once" had me at how-are-ya
Just because every movie reviewer in America is calling "Once"
something like the greatest music movie of this generation and the best
thing since two pints of Guinness on a sleepy Dublin Sunday is no reason
not to listen to me as I grab you by the collar and tell you listen,
listen to these songs, embrace this movie, because this muss of twigs
and straw and strings and pixels and chords can break your heart like a
four-minute-fifty-second pop song you will never get out of your head.
"Once" is just a bit more than nothing at all, yet it is one of the
rare movies where recollection of the simplest gesture, smile, catch or
voice have made me stupid-teary since I first saw it (twice) at
Sundance. The grave, tender secret of this tiny picture is, simply, its
simplicity, its sketchy but efficient form filled with the grandest of
longings.
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 (Glen Hansard), or "busker," and an
unnamed younger woman (Markéta Irglová) with a winsome command of
English meet, tease and 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 with 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, "Once" is a grand, effortless Irish
musical povera (filmed for 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 works at some very sophisticated insights about the
representation of music on film and also how one walks, talks, lives,
breathes, stumbles, fumbles or 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 romance 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 hope 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 and 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 on 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 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" opens Friday at Landmark Century. A Q&A with John Carney,
Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova will appear at Newcity.com on Friday.
You can hear the songs at myspace.com/oncethemovie.
Also by Ray Pride One Dish
Film Review
How goes the Jihad?
Tip of the Week
One Dish
Tip of the Week
The Tyranny of Distance
One Dish
Beer in Gear
Franchise This
Tip of the Week
Love, Truly Love
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