Busker Love
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Once, written and directed by John Carney, is a deceptively simple movie. The narrative is strung together by pop songs, but without the sheen or arrogance of most cinematic musicals.
By day, a Dublin busker (The Frames’ Glen Hansard) sings Van Morrison on a street corner for spare change, which, on occasion, is swiped by old friends in far more desperate straits. At night, the singer switches to his own compositions, most written for the girlfriend who abandoned him (he has no name in the film or credits other than “The Guy”). A Czech girl (Markéta Irglová, billed only as “The Girl”) approaches the Guy and asks him about his songs. He brushes her off; she’s pretty but too young (Irglová was 17 when the movie was shot two years ago). She’s also persistent.
In time, it turns out that this Girl, selling flowers to strangers for loose coins, is also a pianist and singer and every bit the Guy’s equal. And so theirs becomes a friendship and partnership. It’s not quite a relationship because of the Guy’s ex and the Girl’s estranged husband. He teaches her his songs; he gives them heart, but she gives them soul. At last they marshal their forces and book time in a recording studio, where they cut a few tracks that will lead them … where? We have no idea at all by the end of 88 minutes that come and go far too fast. Ah, but that’s the thing about Once: You’ll want to see it twice.
Should you need to revisit the film right away, there is an album on which Hansard and Irglová have collaborated: The Swell Season, released in August of last year. In glib shorthand, Once serves as an extended video for that record, on which Hansard sings like Cat Stevens performing Damien Rice’s songs for a Coldplay crowd as James Blunt forlornly looks on wishing that were he at the mic. Hansard, best known for having played guitarist Outspan in Alan Parker’s The Commitments, writes perfectly heartbreaking pop songs that are lovely all on their own, chiefly the track “Falling Slowly,” heard twice in Once. “I don’t know you,” Hansard sings, “but I want you.”
Yet the magic of the movie is how utterly wrenchingly it renders these songs, which thrive alongside the film’s simple, eloquent, dusky narrative. Hence, Once‘s burgeoning legend among those who saw it, at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, as one of the greatest musicals of the modern age. After all, the Guy and the Girl are musicians; pop songs are their language, how they communicate in ways both grand and miniature. The Guy and the Girl — not to mention Hansard and Irglová — have spent their lives constructing this soundtrack to sing what they can’t quite say.
When she asks him about his life — he lives with his pa, above their vacuum-repair shop — he strums a few notes and sings a few words. But their first duet is something transcendent: a performance of the song “Falling Slowly,” so special that the album doesn’t do it justice. She plays him a few notes of her own song, and she asks him to play something of his. He walks her through a few bars of a song, and the song written for a distant love becomes immediately about this Girl who has wandered into this Guy’s life. They’re no longer strangers awkwardly getting to know each other, but they’re not lovers either.
Credit to Carney, a former member of the Frames more than 15 years ago, for making such a sincere film and having the sense not to bring in hired acting guns to lip-synch someone else’s heartbreak. Cillian Murphy was, at one point, going to play the Guy, and that would have ruined it. Only Hansard knows the secrets that lie between the chords. And that’s what makes Once so astounding.
