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ONCE
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Perhaps reflecting the life situation of their filmmakers, independent movies tend to be set amid life's grittier bohemian milieus, such as a heartbroken Irish singer-songwriter who stands on Dublin's Grafton Street corners wailing to passersby his conflicted feelings about the now-gone love of his life:
I don't know youWhen his guitar-case's meager takings are swiped by a shivering heroin addict, in an outrage he chases down the thief, only to pity him after the collar. The Irish singer (Glen Hansard) is our protagonist, and his songs are one strand of the story that is Once.
But I want you
All the more for that
Words fall through me
And always fool me
And I can't react
A second strand is the girl (Marketa Irglova), a Czech street-vendor of roses drawn to his street-corner ballads, whose accented colloquial English mixes shy flirtation and sober directness. She takes him to a music store where a sympathetic owner lets her play the showroom pianos ("except the Baldwin; she's sold"), where he teaches her the chords:
Take this sinking boat and point it home
We've still got time
Raise your hopeful voice you have a choice
You've made it now
Theirs is a romance born of loneliness, poverty, and shared passion for music, particularly personally expressive music of love mislaid and love lost. Each loves one who is absent; hers back home, his moved to London. They are drawn to each other, but … not yet, so in lieu of physical intimacy they braid the third strand, a demo CD that he hopes, and she thinks, will be his career breakout.
What gives Once its sparkle, lifting it out of romantic clichés, are the genuineness of its two protagonists, who inhabit the characters because they probably are the characters; the passionate musical poetry of Glen Hansard's songs, which run throughout the film; and director John Carney's refusal to succumb to the depressing tropes of angry, self-pitying independent filmmakers. The guy and the girl own their lives; they accept the choices they have made, and they confront absent or lost loves with an adult's acceptance that some pains are the price of those pleasures we chose, and some pleasures are those we must lay by.
So, if you want something
And you call, call
Then I'll come running
To fight, and I'll be at your door
When there's something worth running for
Once refreshes because its characters hope. Never do Once's guy and girl seek handouts, instead working days to sing and song-write by night; never do they complain about life's unfairness; never do they blame others; never are they oppressed by heartless plutocrats. Indeed, all the minor characters, none of whom has more than a dozen lines, are themselves decent people, perhaps bored or uninterested in the guy and girl but never gratuitously cruel. As they are individuals, their reactions have meaning, as when the piano store owner smiles briefly at the girl's playing, or when the intrigued studio technician (Geoff Minogue) is drawn to put down his paper and modulate his soundboard.
Afterwards, when a giddy group of exhausted up-all-night musicians in a beatup Mercedes station wagon greets the sunrise on a wet Irish beach, hearing the guy's songs still sound good even when blared out of Eamon's "crappy car speakers," we understand the exultation of their fatigue, the sense that now, at least once in their lives, they have made something magical to themselves, magical to each other, and magical to the audience.