Film Review: Once

There’s no other way to put this, so I’m just going to go ahead and say it–Once is a musical.

Now, I know that “musical” still tends to be a dirty, dirty word as far as most people are concerned, despite the occasional hit, like 2002’s Chicago, or unique take, like 2000’s Dancer in the Dark, but Once isn’t the sort of musical that those who worry about musicals should worry about.

The level of artificiality inherent in the genre has been stripped away completely. The characters don’t spontaneously break into free-style songs about themselves, nor are there any staged dance numbers.

Rather, the protagonists are both songwriters and musicians. And musicians tend to play and listen to a lot of music.

The film is written and directed by John Carney, the filmmaker responsible for Zonad and On the Edge, and the one-time bassist for Dublin-based band The Frames.

And the male lead is Glen Hansard, lead singer and guitarist for The Frames. It’s probably a pretty safe bet that Frames fans will particularly enjoy the music (You can here the soundtrack at the film’s site).

Hansard’s character works in his elderly father’s Hoover vacuum cleaner repair shop, nursing a broken heart for an ex who now lives in London (and who inspired many of his character’s songs). When not fixing Hoovers, he plays guitar for change from passersby on the streets, and, at night when the crowds thin out, he plays his own songs.

One day he meets young, nameless Czech immigrant Markéta Irglová (in one of the cutest meet-cutes I’ve seen in a while). She’s a pianist who visits a friendly music store in the afternoon to play their pianos since she can’t afford one of her own. After bonding over their mutual love of making music, they begin a short, stumbling courtship, one that coincides with Hansard’s character’s efforts to record a demo to take with him to London to get his girl back.

Both give wonderfully understated and naturalistic performances, doing the bulk of their emoting into microphones and over keyboards, and they share a chemistry so natural that one can feel a little intrusive watching them talk and flirt.

While Carney does most of his storytelling through the music, even resorting to music video-like montages to show us how much Hansard’s character loves his old girlfriend (as he struggles to set a song to a video of her on his laptop) or how he feels about Irglová’s character, he, and the characters, withhold quite a bit of themselves from each other and the audience.

The result is a film that is at turns heartbreaking and uplifting, a love story that trades in realism and raw nerve romanticism and sets it all to sad songs.