A musical for people who can't afford musicals

Rating: 9/10 (23 September 2007)

This is a pleasant if slightly poignant love story about two people whose bond is music rather than lust. It's also one of the cheapest musicals ever made. Guy (Glen Hansard from the band Frame) is Irish, a repairer of Hoovers (vacuum cleaners) who busks with his guitar and voice in Dublin shopping streets in his spare time, nursing the hurt caused by his ex-girlfriend who has left him and gone to London. Girl (Marketa Irglova) is a young mother who has left her husband and her country, the Czech Republic, to seek a better life in Ireland (the film is set a few years back before Ireland became top of the GDP per head pops). Both are writers as much as performers and it is not long before they are recording their own stuff. She clearly likes him, but she rebuffs his advances. No matter, because they make beautiful music together.
For a movie without a great deal of dramatic tension (it is almost documentary-like at time) it is remarkably absorbing. The music is what you'd expect  sentimental pop, but not pap, and generally easy listening. There's not a nasty person in the film, save perhaps for a heroin addict who tries to rip off Guy in the opening frames. The hand-held camera gives immediacy  you might almost be walking down a crowded Grafton St, where this correspondent's grandfather used to ply his trade as a high class Ladies' Draper (Newell's of Dublin, a site now occupied by the more downmarket Dunne's). Glen Hansard is not an actor by profession (though he had a small part in "The Commitments" 15 years ago) but he's fine here, with the right amount of anguish for Guy. Marketa Irglova is just brilliant as the Girl. Casting often means young actors have to appear younger than they actually are, but here Irglova at 17 manages to convince us she is in her mid-twenties, as well as writing and playing a good deal of the music.
This movie was shot in 17 days in and around Dublin and cost about $US 150,000. Much of the music is original and the performers are mostly musicians, not actors. It's a slight piece but it holds together well despite the lack of dramatic tension. You come out of the theatre in a cheerful frame of mind. Perhaps it does help if you like folk-pop music but this is pleasant, accessible stuff. I'd like to think that Granddad wouldn't have rung the Garda to have them moved on.