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Writer and director -
John Carney
Director
of photography- Tim Fleming
Editor - Paul
Mullen
Music -
Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova
Production
designer - Tamara Conboy
Producer -
Martina Niland
Fox Searchlight Pictures. 88 minutes.
STARRING: Glen Hansard (the Guy) and Marketa
Irglova (the Girl).
Rated R for language.
So many times in the past decade, we’ve heard a
film lauded as “the return of the movie musical.” Evita. Chicago. The
Phantom of the Opera. The Producers. Dreamgirls. Next: Hairspray.
Though Chicago has its Best Picture Oscar to back its claim,
these “reborn” movie musicals often seem to fall flat. Part of the
problem may actually lie with the style of the more recent musicals
themselves: stage shows like Phantom wowed audiences because they
jacked up the “spectacle” factor of theater to new heights and in fact
tried to challenge cinema’s monopoly on razzle-dazzle
— but it’s actually
difficult for film to convey the visceral thrill of having a
three-dimensional chandelier come swooping down over your head. Film,
however, can capture finely tuned emotions in a close-up on a
character’s face, in a shot of calloused fingers strumming a guitar
— and
it’s this intimate aspect of the medium that Once, the new “Irish
rock musical,” successfully embraces.
Once, which has been charming film festivals, critics, and
audiences alike, is about as far from grandiosity as you can imagine. In
fact, the label “musical” is a little misleading, because all the
movie’s songs occur in the context of rehearsals or performances by the
musician characters; no random bursting into song here. Glen Hansard,
real-life lead singer for The Frames (the band for which Once’s
writer/director, John Carney, was formerly a bassist) , plays a Dublin
busker moping after his lyin’, cheatin’ girlfriend (as he relates in a
hilarious song called “Broken Hearted Hoover-Fixer Sucker Guy”—in
addition to busking, he also helps out with his father’s vacuum cleaning
business, hence the “Hoover-Fixer”).
He is prodded back into life gradually through the tenaciousness of a
young Czech immigrant woman, also a musician —
and, even better, she’s a
musician with a broken vacuum cleaner. Once’s protagonists, known
simply as the Guy and the Girl, discover how well his guitar-playing and
her piano-playing blend, and they wonder if this musical harmony means
that they are meant to be together romantically.
Once has also been dubbed a “love story,” and it is one, but not
in the standard Hollywood mode. The love between Guy and Girl develops
into the true kind of love that will sacrifice self-interest for the
sake of the other. In some ways, the relationship between Guy and Girl
actually reminds me of the relationship between the two main characters
in Lost in Translation —
both pairs have other commitments, but both pairs are drawn
together in part by their shared status as outsiders. Guy and Girl,
however, are much more easily likable and probably less in need of
anti-depressants than Bill Murray’s and Scarlett Johansson’s characters.
And, as compared to Lost in Translation, Once suggests
much more hope in the ability of humans to communicate with each other,
at least through music.
Watching Once, I several times wished for subtitles, for the song
lyrics as well as the dialogue. The Dublin accents can be difficult to
decipher. In spite of sometimes making up my own lyrics when I couldn’t
understand the real ones, I didn’t feel mystified at any point about
what the characters were feeling. Hansard and Marketa Irglova, who plays
the Girl, are not trained actors, but they are musical collaborators in
real life, and they prove to be powerful performers both of their own
songs and of the dialogue written by Carney. The lyrics certainly give
us a window into the characters’ lives, but it’s not necessary to
understand every word.
Carney chooses the phrase “visual album” rather than “musical” to
describe Once’s genre, and it’s true that, in some ways, Once
is like a concept album illustrated with film. The music is the
primary driving force, and the story seems to form organically around
the songs—you never get the feeling, as you sometimes do in a musical,
that the composers scratched their heads and said, “Now how can I make a
song fit here?” No, as much as I love 1940s and 1950s musicals, I think
the era of the “I’m going to break into song now” movie musical is gone.
It either has to be done with self-reflexive cynicism, as in the
hospital delivery-room dance scene in Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I
Love You, or simply and naturally, as in Once.
Once’s low budget is almost as famous as its rave reviews: the
movie was made for under $200,000. (A higher budget had been planned,
and rising star Cillian Murphy was slated to play the role of the Guy,
but when he backed out, the film lost some of its producers. It’s only
at that point that Hansard was cast as the singer of his own songs.) One
of the things I noticed about Once was that neither Guy nor Girl
had a cell phone — an oddity indeed in contemporary, tech-savvy Dublin,
and no doubt a symbol of their outsider status. The lack of cell phones
could also be a metaphor for the movie itself: a low-tech movie without
glamour or special effects, relying on old-fashioned methods of
communication — and delighting us, without the razzle-dazzle.
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