Once upon a time, a guy met a girl.

Rating: Null/10 (16 October 2007)

Once (2006) ****
A minimalist musical. It sounds an oxymoron. Alas it is not, it is John Carney's charming "Once." Carney directs the picture with no more and no less than what is necessary. This is an admirable choice for an indie film - a category that has come to be muddled with flash and pizazz cinematography. It is also admirable in that Carney takes his seat at the back, unnoticed, and allows his two leads, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, to take front and centre. The film belongs to them and their music.
The story opens as the guy (Hansard) busk's, chases a man who is apparently a friend stealing his money, and then after dark when he can play his own songs (for people only pay for what they already know) he is questioned by a young woman, Girl (Irglova). Names are never given. She asks him what the songs are about - his ex he says. Where is she, girl says. She's gone, guy says. Why don't you go get her in London, girl asks? He converses with her, to his slight annoyance, and tells her that his official job is working in his father's vacuum shop. Great she says, I will take you my hoover and you can fix it for me tomorrow. Sure enough she shows up, dragging her hoover behind her as if she is walking a dog. Its strange, amusing and surprisingly charming.
He tries to get out of it, saying he doesn't have his tools and that he is going on break. She persuades him to allow her to come along and he can just have a look at it. She tells him that she is a musician as well, a pianist, but that she cannot afford a piano, so she plays for an hour every day at a local music shop. They go, he listens to her, she persuades him to teach her one of his songs. This will be the first time they play together, and we get the feeling immediately that there is something special.
After fixing her vacuum back at the shop, at his fathers house where he lives, they go upstairs and listen to his tapes. He asks her to stay. Surprisingly she seems offended and shocked and leaves. After apologizing the next day, he finds that she has a daughter. After a motorcycle ride, he finds out she has a husband back in the Czech Republic. He asks her how to say "Do you love him," in "the Czech." She tells him, he repeats it back to her as a question. She responds in Czech, and refuses to translate.
She persuades him that he should go to London, seek out his ex, and pursue his music career. First he must get a professional recording. After securing a bank loan, from an unexpected and hilarious loan officer, he recruits fellow buskers and girl to join him. The music they create is beautiful enough to sway the jaded producer. Their feelings become obvious to us - he asks her to come with him to London, she says she has to take her mother and child if that was the case and they both realize its not possible. They complete their recordings, the music acting as the medium into which they channel their emotions for one another, the guy buys his ticket to London with encouragement from his father on his music, and she tells him that her husband is coming to Ireland to work things out for the sake of their child. Thats great, guy says.
That Marketa Irglova and Glen Hansard fell in love in real life gives more poignancy to the story, and adds that much of punch by the time the inevitable must occur. The film breaks conventions not only of musicals but of romance. It is another example of how sometimes the most romantic movies of all can end up unresolved. Think of Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love. In neither film will you see the leads kiss, and there is barely an embrace. But the emotion is there, and that makes them all the more powerful and painful.
Once is about the love you feel, but cannot express. Guy and Girl have the rare opportunity to channel their emotions through music. Right from the get go, it is established that Guy is a broken soul, he has been writing about and yearning for his ex. Girl shows up and represents something new, and we find too that she is a broken soul. Once breaks down the standards of movie musicals as bombastic and entertaining spectacles, and instead shows us how music can be at once the bemoaning of our pain, and the mending of our souls.