Disappointing

Rating: 2/10 (21 January 2018)

I am unable to join - or indeed to understand - what seems to be the universal chorus of adulation for this film. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing the matter with the acting, or the cinematography - the problem is, the plot. There isn't one. It is about a busker who decides he wants to make a demo CD, he gets together a scratch band and they record it. That's it, really. Along the way he befriends a married Czech woman who is waiting for her husband to join her in Dublin, and who plays keyboards in his band. At the end, the busker goes off to London to rejoin his former girlfriend. That's it. End of. The only moment of drama in the whole film comes right at the beginning when a thief tries to take the busker's takings and there is a chase down the street. Aside from that, nothing really happens. Was the demo CD helpful in promoting a musical career for the busker? We never find out. Having made the whole film revolve around the busker's efforts to record this demo, once it was made the director then seems to have lost interest in what happened to it. I don't know if maybe the only point of the film was supposed to be to showcase the music? Well, you either liked that or you didn't. Personally I didn't care for it.