Once Upon a Time … When the Music Spoke

This is the fourth in a series of essays about great films from the first decade of the 21st Century. I'll pick a new movie each week leading right up to my final list in December 2009.

A great number of films strive for honest portrayals of love. Most of them fail and aim for lust instead — after all, sex requires far less talent and is so much more titillating. Here’s a film that presents us with two people brought together by a love so great there’s no room on the screen for it to manifest in the form of sex, or even an innocent kiss or warm embrace. Like Casablanca long before it, Once is about a man and a woman who, for reasons slightly beyond their control, can’t be together, but that doesn’t stop intimacy so profound that the film seems unprepared for the gravity of it.

Once is one of the more beautiful love stories of the cinema. It stars two people who were, at the time, falling in love themselves. They’re both musicians, which means their hearts are already tuned to love’s frequency. He is Glen Hansard, the singer and guitarist for the Irish band The Frames. She is Markéta Irglová, a Czech singer and frequent Frames collaborator. They essentially play themselves in John Carney’s musical fable set on a lovely Dublin street, where the only people we meet are musicians with unappreciated skills.

He is simply known as Guy in the credits, and she is Girl, although they are never identified as anything in the film. He is a street performer in a bustling plaza. He takes requests in the day, but at night he performs his own material, music that reveals the hurt, betrayed heart withering behind his battered guitar. She is a Czech immigrant selling flowers to tourists and she comes across his music at a vulnerable moment as he bleeds heartache during one particularly hurtful song. I love her entrance: the camera moves in slowly on his face as he sings the final lines of the song and as the camera pulls back there she is, as if materializing from a dream.

They become friends. He repairs her vacuum cleaner. She writes lyrics for a song he had long ago stopped tinkering with. She invites him to her apartment, where he finds out she has a daughter, an absent husband and three Czech neighbors who come over to watch football on her television set, the only one in the building. Abruptly and inexplicably, he decides to travel to London to get his girlfriend back and maybe get some kind of record contract. But before he goes, he wants to lay some tracks down in the studio now that he has a true collaborator and a backup band of other street performers. At times the film stops being a film altogether and nearly becomes a behind-the-scenes feature on a band documentary: there is lots of studio footage, candid music experimentation and playful moments on a beach during a break in recording. Even as the film wanders through these musical montages, though, the camera lingers on the budding romance between Guy and Girl.

Of course he loves her and he doesn’t want to leave. He respects her too much to force himself on her, even though that is a mistake he nearly makes in the film’s early moments. At one point he asks her if she loves her husband, to which she responds with several words in Czech. It’s a Lost in Translation moment and we’re not meant to know what she says, but the coy smile on her face suggests she might have answered, “No, because I love you.” The ending of the film is perfect, delicate and wonderful. A lesser filmmaker would have made it a tragedy, but Carney makes it a story of endlessly uplifting hope.

Once is a fairy tale. It’s also a musical. Music injects itself in every scene, and many of the plot developments are based on the actual recording or writing of the songs on the soundtrack. Consider a wonderful moment for Irglová: she’s in her apartment writing lyrics for Hansard’s song and her CD player runs out of batteries. She throws a jacket over her pajamas and walks down to the market for some double-As. On her return journey, in an unbroken camera shot on Dublin’s dark car-lined streets, she sings the song she just finished writing (“If You Want Me”). It’s a moving song that reveals the depth of her own pain and regret. In another scene, she sits at a piano and weeps as she ponders her own future in a mournful ballad (“The Hill”).

Once is filled with a number of poignant moments, but none quite like the singing of “Falling Slowly,” the song that won Hansard and Irglová an Academy Award. The scene takes place in a music store, where he teaches her how to perform a song he’s been working on. He runs through the verse, chorus and bridge, and she writes piano parts right there on the spot. After only several minutes they begin playing the song in a sequence too magical not to be a fairy tale. I love how the camera never leaves their faces; only once does it cut to a reaction shot of the store owner, who quietly nods his approval of the enchantment taking place behind him. To appreciate the scene more, we must leave the context of the film and visit the Oscar ceremony (see it here). After an emotional performance of the song live, Hansard and Irglová win an Oscar, but due to a misplaced musical cue only Hansard gets to make an acceptance speech. Later, after the commercial break, host Jon Stewart, in a classy move, stops the show and asks Irglová to come out to have her moment. Her belated speech should be considered part of the Once canon: “… Fair play to those who dare to dream and don’t give up. This song was written from a perspective of hope and hope at the end of the day connects us all, no matter how different we are.”

John Carney’s film is an uplifting picture made with considerable talent under what must have been difficult conditions using digital cameras in available light. Apparently it took like 17 days to shoot, which is as speedy as it gets. I object to the treatment of the DVD cover — where the movie poster is Photoshop’d so Hansard and Irglová are closer together and holding hands, and now wearing different clothes — but that’s hardly Carney’s fault. How he managed to get complex performances out of non-actors, musicians no less, is remarkable. And the statement he makes about love and hope is beautiful and pure.

I don't follow celebrity romances too much, but when I heard that Hansard and Irglová had broken up a year or so after their Oscar win, it hurt almost as much as the end of Once. It's our hope that the characters, and the actors playing them, can be happy forever. The film, though, provides the answer to that: love, no matter how fleeting, is an emotion that's always worth having, be it for 20 minutes or 20 years. Yes, Guy and Girl's love was short-lived, but once it's there it never leaves.