a SIFF 2007 review
Bittersweet Once a Musical Treasure
A Guy (Glen Hansard) is singing his heartfelt songs of longing and heartbreak on the street corner. A Girl (Markéta Irglová) watches him, intently studying his every move and listening to each note as if the fate of the world depended upon her doing so. Together, these two societal misfits with a musical longing become friends, joining forces to put together a small band and record some of these songs to disc before the Guy goes off to London to try and reconnect with the woman he loves and lost once upon a time in the past.
The new independent musical Once, a smash success with both audiences and critics at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is a small miracle and easily one of the most triumphant pictures I’ve had the pleasure to see this year. I adored it, fell madly in love with each frame each note each nuance each lyric. It is a movie I’ve been unable to get out of my head ever since I was privileged enough to see it, my longing to go back and experience it again only growing each and every passing second.
This probably sounds like high praise for a tiny little Irish independent feature. Trust me, it isn’t. What writer-director John Carney and stars Hansard and Irglová have accomplished is nothing short of extraordinary. So many musicals nowadays believe bigger, louder, brasher and more extravagant is better. They are wrong. This is a film reveling in the quiet, a picture that knows how to listen to its characters’ nuances and then compose its wondrous self in their image.
For all their strengths, this is one thing Hollywood big budget song and dance mega-projects like Dreamgirls, The Phantom of the Opera and The Producers sadly lack. The best of them (Moulin Rouge, Chicago) can be fun, sure, but even they are so overeager to entertain and wow an audience with razzle-dazzle they tend to forget about the human element sometimes altogether. The effect is that this leads me to believe the future of the musical won’t be found in films like the upcoming Hairspray, but instead nuzzled happily inside the sweet and lyrically soulful confines of movies just like this.
I’m not sure what else there is to say. I loved this movie, adored every single second of it. Hansard and Irglová are a modern day Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson, portraying characters not too far removed from the ones depicted by that duo in David Lean’s timeless 1945 adaptation of Brief Encounter. Instead of a train station, they meet on a street corner and it is music, not the end of a World War, which brings them together. But their embraces are limited to touches on the shoulder, hugs of exuberance and looks of bittersweet longing, their story an unrequited love filled with such stirring emotion I couldn’t help but cry.
As of this moment I have seen three perfect (or at least near-perfect) films in 2007. Two of them, The Lives of Others and Black Book, are actually 2006 releases, only opening this side of the Atlantic now. The third, David Fincher’s Zodiac, was an unfortunately under-seen police procedural masterwork. As much as I adored them all, I think this is the one I would put above all three and watch over and over again without hesitation. That is the glory of Once, a true musical treasure impossible to forget.
Film Rating: êêêê (out of 4)
(Click here for an interview with the filmmakers)
