Brief Encounter - the Musical

Rating: 9/10 (17 December 2007)

In many ways, Joe Carnahan's ONCE is a musical version of David Lean's BRIEF ENCOUNTER. The simple story of an aspiring musician and a Czechoslovakian cleaning woman who meet on the streets of Dublin and literally make beautiful music together is both conventional and original. ONCE is original in the way that it addresses the awkwardness of characters breaking into song. For the most part, the music we hear is being performed. It isn't something that only the characters hear. This prevents the tunes from clashing with the naturalistic setting, the gritty locales, the hand-held camera work. It's also just disarming enough to help us overlook that the story being told both apart from and through the music is essentially a romantic fairy tale. The title should clue us in to that.