"Once" Review

Once is an independent film, shot simplistically with digital technology that combines a healthy blend of comedy, romance and desperation—on a budget of $160,000 using musicians doubling as actors, to help the story along. Both the film’s stars are experienced musicians, Glen Hansard himself started busking when he was just thirteen and Marketa Irglova started playing music at the age of seven.

The story is about a chance encounter between an Irish guy, Glen Hansard, employed at his father’s hoover repair shop by day and busking by night, and Czech immigrant, Marketa Irglova, who takes odd jobs selling flowers in the street to earn money to care for her mother and daughter. Throughout the film, Hansard and Irglova remain unnamed, appearing finally as Guy and Girl in the credits. Both are interested in music and it is this shared passion that leads them together through a strange series of events, ultimately concluding with the creation of an album foreshadowed to be Guy’s big break as his pending move to London nears. These events are shadowed by the romance that grows between them but is held back by their lingering past relationships.

Built on a small budget the movie was filmed digitally and in a very simple style that meant that it was up to the actors to create the story. The perspective that the film gives acts firmly as a passive objective observer to the story at hand. In this way the events are allowed to tell the story without needing any fancy cinematography to accentuate. In one scene they enjoy dinner with some friends in which afterwards each person sings. The scene is very personal and exclusive. This is a style that produces an entertainingly intimate movie.

Most of the scenes take place in ordinary settings, like a bus or the street, and gives the movie a down to earth feeling. There are no real mega twists in the plotline nor is the script extravagant. Everything would seem rather basic and bland were it not for the music.

Once is musical but it is not a musical. Musicals are characterized by an obvious replacement of music for normal communications and conversations. Although there is still communicative significance to the songs in the film, they are executed in a more personal music for the sake of music style, versus music for the sake of continuing the plotline.

John Carney and Hansard should be commended, directing and composing the movie and the music, respectively: both elements carrying equal weight in its success. Simplicity itself is its beauty and it is brought to life through its music, charged with the character’s emotions behind it. Its hard to place this film in any one category, not a musical, not a comedy, not really a romance and not totally tragic—it seems that it is just like life: a healthy blend of them all.