Once is a strange and singular phenomenon.
It’s an extremely low-budget indie from Ireland that defies genre label
and is usually described as a “folk rock musical romance” or something.
Its stars are unknown in the U.S., and yet if the hype already
surrounding it is any measure, it looks like Once will be this
summer’s Little Miss Sunshine (both films were distributed by Fox
Searchlight, interestingly).
The story of Once (written and directed by
John Carney) is wonderfully simple. A guy on a Dublin street
strumming his guitar (Glen Hansard of the Dublin indie-folk band The
Frames) attracts the attention of a girl on the street (Czech actress
Markéta Irglová). Turns out she’s a piano
player, and when they go to the back of a piano shop for a spontaneous
jam session, we find out that they harmonize beautifully. The rest of
the movie consists of the two drawing closer, as they gradually learn
more about each other and make beautiful music together.
Unlike traditional movie
musicals, Once does not feel artificial (i.e. characters do not
break out in song as a substitute for conversation), and the songs make
perfect sense in the context of the story. Fans of The Frames will be in
heaven watching the film, and everyone else should warm to the folky,
Damien Rice-esque style by the second or third song. By the end of the
film (in which we witness an all night recording session and feel the
exuberant payoff when the musicians first listen to the completed track
in their car), you’ll want to buy the soundtrack.
But this movie is about
far more than music, and this is where it transcends “cute novelty” and
becomes something far more meaningful.
The title of Once should hint at what the
film is really about: time, momentary experience, and fleeting human
connection. Comparisons to films like Lost in Translation and
Before Sunrise/Sunset are accurate in this sense. All of these
films are about a guy and a girl who meet by chance in an alienating
urban environment and share —
for a time — a joyous mutuality that
transcends everything beyond the scope of the here and now.
The lovely thing about this style of filmmaking
— and
Once exemplifies it —
is that the plot unfolds in such a way that
nothing is merely a stepping-stone to something else. The unobtrusive
(though largely handheld) camera revels in the moment, quietly
observing the magic of the everyday —
whether it is Hansard repairing a
Hoover vacuum (this is his day job), or
Irglová
searching desperately in the middle of the
night for batteries to her archaic discman. The best moments, of course,
are the delicate interactions between the two of them, when we feel the
aching of love in its earliest stages, adorned by uncertainty and
tempered by the restraint of not wanting to spoil something so pure.
Perhaps the song most central to the film is the one Hansard and Irglová
first perform together, which begins with Hansard singing: I don't
know you / but I want you / all the more for that.
There is something
inexplicably sacred about the space this film inhabits
— everything about
it feels true, raw, incarnate. From the land of Ireland (green, grey,
salty, ancient) to the working class, immigrant streets of Dublin (Irglová
and her non-English-speaking mother live in a tiny apartment in a Czech
neighborhood), there is a spare realism and cold, mundane beauty in each
frame. A sunrise scene on the beach (which reminded me of the end of
Lost in Translation and Before Sunrise) provides that great
“morning after” mix of joy and emptiness which, in the end, is the
spiritual terrain Once navigates.
Paul Schrader, in his
book Transcendental Style in Film, defines the achievement of
transcendence in film as a three-step process of 1) the meticulous
representation of the “everyday” (the inexpressive banality which is
“the bare threshold of existence”), 2) the introduction of disparity or
conflict between man and his everyday environment (“if a human being can
have true and tender feelings within an unfeeling environment …where do
man’s feelings come from?”), and 3) a cathartic restoration of “stasis”
which does not resolve the conflict but transcends it. Stasis is that
feeling when you can accept the tension in life and
— through it —
witness
the divine, “Wholly Other.”
Such an aesthetic of
transcendence is demonstrated in many films (Schrader thought it best
represented in the films of Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer), and Once
is a perfect example of it. Here we have an everyday which is disrupted
by the introduction of disparity —
two people who awake to a longing and
lacking through the introduction of the other. But the love they
experience (if it is love) can only go so far in correcting their
discontent. It is a temporary fix —
albeit lovely, wonderful, truly once
in a lifetime — which provides an answer of sorts, but only in the sense
that it points to some other, greater Answer —
the Transcendent.
Once,
like Translation, derives its immense romantic satisfaction from
precisely what doesn’t happen or isn’t there. The moments of connection
in the film are made all the greater by the insatiable specter of
impermanence which haunts our every moment. Like music, film is a
temporal art. It is made up of artistic moments (images, sounds) that
are here and then gone, in the blink of an eye. Every song which is
performed live is only ever experienced “once,” and thus the musical
motif of Once makes perfect sense. We can record these moments
and revisit them (as the characters of this film do when they record a
song together), but the original “now” of the moment is forever lost.
