Apenas Uma Vez

Glen Hansard plays an unnamed street performer in Dublin. Markéta Irglová plays an unnamed Czech immigrant flower girl who takes an interest in him on a lonely night. He's getting over a girl. She's fascinated with him and soon they're making beautiful music together.

There is something magical about discovering two unknowns (Hansard is known in his country) in a sweet under-written romance. It never pushes hard. Markéta is utterly sweet. The romance is hesitant. The music is beautiful. In a world of big bombastic high budget Broadway style musicals, this indie musical has more heart than most of them could hope for.

Watching "Once" is like sitting in on a jam session. It's mellow and relaxed. It doesn't amount to much, but it's pleasant enough.

The director has said that he set out to make a movie so simple that the story could be summarized on the back of a postage stamp, and he's succeeded. An Irish busker meets a Czech émigré, and both flit around the edges of falling for each other while recording a demo album of the busker's music. Both are struggling with the loves in their lives, he with a girlfriend in London, she with her estranged husband and father to her little girl. The resolution of their stories, what resolution there is, felt right and realistic. This isn't a fairy tale, but neither is it Shakespearean tragedy. Life simply goes on.

The film's biggest asset is its music, and indeed most of the songs in the film we see performed in their entirety. The movie isn't exactly a musical in the strictest sense of the word, since characters don't spontaneously burst into choreographed musical numbers, but like the best musicals, the songs in "Once" illuminate the characters and play an integral role in the storytelling.

A low-key little gem of a movie.

Grade: A

From the moment ONCE begins, it is clear that the experience about to be had is unlike any you've had before. A busker sings for his dollar in the street. The quality of the image is grainy; the steadiness of the camera is shaky at best. The day turns into night and the song goes from bright to dark. The passion with which it is sung is almost overwhelming and suddenly borders on off putting. From the manner in which the busker is framed, it isn't clear whether anyone is there to hear his song but his fervor brushes skepticism aside and declares that the song itself and the satisfaction derived from singing it, outweigh the importance of having someone hear it. But someone is listening after all. A young woman from the Czech Republic stands transfixed before our busker on this Dublin street and a spark ignites the flame that gives ONCE its warmth. Writer/Director, John Carney, removes all convention from the movie musical and creates a film that reads like a well-written love song about two musicians falling in love with each other and the music they create together.

In the early 90's, Carney left his rock group, The Frames, to pursue a career in film-making. The Frames continued on without him and new lead singer, Glen Hansard, eventually took leave to search out new musical ventures, moving from Dublin to the Czech Republic. Here he met Marketa Irglova, a classically trained pianist, and they developed a project entitled The Swell Season. Though the two are not linked romantically, their meeting and the music that came out of that became Carney's inspiration for ONCE. During the week that follows their initial meeting on the street, the two artists who are never referred to by name in the film, learn to accept that they are inexplicably drawn to each other. Given the chance, a relationship between the two could become one that would help each other grow. He would make a great father figure to her young child and she would drive him to make something of himself. Though ONCE's tone is simple, these two characters' lives are not. He has a girlfriend in London he longs to be with but feels he cannot out of obligation to his father in Dublin, while she is still married to an estranged husband whom she is unsure she has a future with. The trick then becomes to remain in the moment with each other and never allow for their relationship to go where it naturally feels it should.

Albeit a modern approach to a movie musical, ONCE is not so modern that it leaves the music behind. Instead the music becomes the catalyst for love. She is first drawn to him by the sound of his song. He sings it with such passion that it gives her a direct view of his soul. It is not all who are able to show such vulnerability yet when the song ends, he trips over his spoken words and nothing comes out as it should. At first, she almost seems a nuisance to him. It isn't until he hears the beautiful music she can make with her hands that the glimpse of her soul captures all his attention. Theirs is a mating ritual carried out in song. When one sings or plays, the other listens. When one cannot express the proper sentiment in words, it is music that gets the point across. When the two find themselves alone in a local musical instrument shop, they learn what it means to sing together. In order to do so, they must truly listen to the sound of the other's voice and fall into the same pace and rhythm of their notes. Their voices, as it turns out, are the perfect compliment to each other. The harmony they create leads into a song that is itself a representation of the love between them, both fragile and pure.

The delicate chemistry between Hansard and Irglova is framed in such a stripped fashion that it only further serves to concretize the genuine sincerity between the two. Almost entirely hand held and lit only with natural light, ONCE seems less like intricate film-making and more like layered storytelling, or perhaps more appropriately, song writing. Put simply, ONCE is like a perfectly soft song played acoustically in a park; it seeps into your soul, soothing you as the sun beats down upon your smiling face, allowing for all cynicism to melt away while your reaffirmed belief in love is sung from your mouth.

ONCE is a film to see and cherish for the magic of song and music combined in the setting of Dublin for a young man and woman who meet and who make wonderful music together. The only issue is she's married to a bloke in another country. But that doesn't stop them for creating a wonderful piece of music which will stay with them forever.

John Carney has directed and written a brilliant film which tags at your heart and makes your feet dance all at the same time. "Guy and Girl" are tremendous in their parts and the humor and passion they bring to their music. Dublin is such a great location for this film and it resembles London in so many of its blocks of buildings. The bond is also wonderful to see between father and son and the encouragement which the father gives his son.

ONCE gives you a time in your life when you meet your soul mate who brings the music to your heart you have always dreamed of...as well as a Hoover vacuum-"who knew?" See ONCE, because "once" you do, you may come back for more.

I write these for friends and if you love movies you are a friend: I saw a movie last night that was so good that I have spent the last hour looking up information about it on the Internet Movie Data Base and related links. I have included the Fox Searchlight website for the movie at the bottom of this review so you can hear the music. So now I know that is was made in 17 days and at a cost of less than $150K and reflects a Dublin of 10-15 years ago when Dublin was much poorer and more working class.

And, I would be much poorer in life and spirit, and my heart, like most of us, covered in scar tissue from life, would not seem so vulnerable and new, if I had not seen this movie. A simple story of a street musician in Ireland, singing covers during the day for Euros, and his own music at night for cents. A verging on middle aged man, still living with his Da, repairing vacuums in a tiny shop and writing songs to his lost love in his tinier bedroom. Approached by girl, an immigrant, who loves his songs, understands the pain that gave them life, and soon they are in a music shop with the girl playing the piano and together they prove that art isn't produced from big budgets or green lit by ten vice presidents and that seventeen days and a pittance can make me get goose bumps just trying to write a review of what I saw in a dark theater with ten other people in a complex dominated by Shrek, Pirates, and Spiderman.

I knew a woman once who only read novels about unrequited love. What a wonderful phrase: unrequited love. Archaic, unrequited, love, universally known and unknown, and as a friend said about the movie and its songs: no great art came from happiness. But the movie isn't sad, it's pulsing with life and music and incident and the process of how art is made. I have always been a sucker for movies about how art is made: Shakespeare in Love, Topsy Turvey, as examples, but in both those, art that was known. In Once, on the streets of Dublin, an Irishman and a Czech girl, remind us of how, to my generation, the guitar was king, a guitar, bass, drums and piano a symphony orchestra, and there was no power like the power of rock and roll. In all generations, love sought, found, lost, and sometimes regained is the stuff that brings us to the theater, to the book, to the movie.

I'm in the midst of reading a book by an Irishman, a detective novel, the hero a reader, and the author uses the book to list books he likes: from one...'the body moves on, the mind stays and circles the events of the past.' This must be true of the writer/director.

You won't forget these people. I can't forget their songs. We should all meet, my movie loving friends, and talk about this movie in a bar in Chicago I know that has great music on the jukebox, cold cold beer, and is dark enough so we would all look good. Neil Young sang: only love can break your heart, Once asks 'how often do you meet the right person', and as fellow movie goers I ask how often can the right movie be made, shown in your local, and break/make you heart at seven of a beautiful summer's eve? It's the best movie of the year. Maybe of the last five years. But, I am not a dispassionate critic, I loved it.