WSJ
FILM REVIEW
By JOE MORGENSTERN
Magical 'Once'
Is Pitch-Perfect
Rock Love Story
Thirteen Eloquent Songs
And a Battered Guitar;
Shrek's Welcome Return
May 18, 2007; Page W1
It takes all of 10 seconds for John Carney's "Once" to announce itself
as something special. A handsome young street musician in Dublin
raises his voice in song, then raises it higher with heart-stopping
fervor. When a mysteriously endearing young woman stops to interrogate
the busker about his music -- she turns out to be a musician too --
the movie reveals itself as something magical. When they sing their
first duet, it's a song of such transporting passion that you wonder
where the drama can possibly go, since they're obviously made for each
other and should instantly leave the screen to live the rest of their
lives in private bliss.
The lovers are played by Glen Hansard, the lead singer of the Irish
rock group The Frames, and Marketa Irglova, a musician from the Czech
Republic. (Amazingly, given her gifts as a singer, pianist and
actress, Ms. Irglova was only 17 years old when the movie was shot.)
Both performances give new meaning to the timeworn phrase
"pitch-perfect," while both characters do nicely without names;
they're listed in the credits only as the Guy and the Girl. Coy
appellations of this sort often serve as warning labels for
faux-simple fables that are fatuous or downright cloying, but that's
hardly the case here. "Once" proves to be as smart and funny as it is
sweet; it swirls with ambiguity and conflict beneath a simple surface.
In all of 88 minutes, Mr. Carney's singular fable follows its guy and
girl through a week of musical and emotional growth that could suffice
for a lifetime.
Music is intrinsic to the filmmaker's plan. The love story can be seen
-- and felt and heard -- as a succession of chord changes, and the
exquisite resolution amounts to a mutual musical offering. At a time
when movie musicals have come to be synonymous with emotional and
visual extravagance -- the super-mega-over-the-topness of "Chicago" or
"Dreamgirls" -- Mr. Carney has dared to take everything down to its
essence. What's left is two intensely likable people trying urgently,
through very few words and a baker's dozen of eloquent songs, to come
to terms with love they've lost and collaborate on the future.
As Guys go, this one seems like the answer to a Girl's prayer. He
sings like an angel -- a loud angel who's no stranger to anger. He
summons sumptuous sounds from his battered guitar, and writes
brilliant songs when he isn't fixing Hoover vacuums in his father's
Dickensian shop. As Girls go, this one is irresistible from the first
moment she opens her mouth: When was the last time you couldn't wait
to find out what a movie character was all about? She's got spunk to
spare, speaks with a slightly extra-terrestrial accent, sings with no
accent at all, writes her own powerful songs and, miracle of miracles,
has a Hoover that needs repair. (In one of the many memorable
sequences in the film, which was shot by Tim Fleming, she trails her
ailing vacuum cleaner, like a blue dog on a hose, as she and her Guy
stroll through Dublin's streets.)
In 1991, the year that Glen Hansard started The Frames, he also played
Outspan, the baby-faced Dublin guitar player in "The Commitments," a
feature that has gained a global following. (It's one of my favorite
films ever.) What makes "The Commitments" so widely loved is, among
other pleasures, its use of a working-class rock band's rise and fall
as an armature for individual drama. "Once" may earn the same special
status by doing something similar, albeit on a more intimate scale --
using pop-rock songs to shape its characters' ecstatic feelings. And
very much like "The Commitments," this remarkable new Irish film
grounds its Guy and Girl in the rock-solid specifics of musicianship.
When she plays Mendelssohn on a piano in a music store, he listens
with enchanted intensity. When they finally get to singing lyrics she
has written to his melody, the sense of their intimacy transcends
physicality. (It's worth noting that the story neither needs nor
bothers with conventional sexual interludes.)
My own feeling is that I should say something negative here; how else
will anyone trust all this praise? In fact, the film presents
inevitable language problems -- not bad language, of which there is
more than a soupçon, but the authentic and sometimes impenetrable
language of a guy from Ireland and a girl from Moravia who don't speak
in mid-Atlantic tones. Another problem could be more substantial, or
may have been confined to the projection at my screening, where the
audio quality of some of the music tracks left a lot to be desired.
Enough of that, though. The title of one of those tracks is "You Must
Have Fallen From the Sky." That's the way I came to feel about "Once."
