The Universal and the Specific: Once Review

Film musicals don’t usually work for me, but stage musicals do. I think it’s because seeing a play requires more imagination from the audience whereas movies supply the majority of the imagination for the viewers and the audience only needs to suspend disbelief for a couple of hours. I don’t like movie musicals where life looks pretty normal and then all of a sudden singing and dancing appear. A movie musical is kind of like a sci-fi film. Sci-fi (or SF for those who care) has to provide me a universe where I believe people can fly ships in outer space co-piloted by seven foot tall bi-ped dogs. Movie musicals have to provide me a world where I believe people would break out into song. Baz Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge! (2001) is a prime example of a musical that worked for me. John Carney’s film Once (2007) is another example, though in a much different way.

Once is set in a very realistic time and place. It is not a musical like Moulin Rouge!, Singin’ in the Rain, or Chicago. Rather, it is a de facto musical because it follows musicians whose songs make up the majority of the film. Carney’s script walks this amazing balance of the universal and the specific. The main characters are simply credited as Guy (Glen Hansard) and Girl (Markéta Irglová) and we follow a love story so basic in its skeleton that one could write the whole plot on a Post-It: Guy is a struggling musician in Ireland whose girlfriend left him for another man and moved to London. Girl is a Czech expatriate living in Dublin with her mother and young daughter. Girl hears Guy playing his songs on the street and they begin a friendship surrounding Guy’s powerful songs — Girl is actually a classically-trained pianist. The parameters of this love story couldn’t be anymore universal: guy meets girl. But Once is told with such sincerity and originality that when we watch it, we realize we are watching a reinvigoration of two genres: the musical and the love story.

Carney has chosen a bare-bones production, using hand-held digital cameras with a lot of natural lighting. These production choices give Once a realistic feeling. I believe it when I see Girl singing a song as she walks through the streets of Dublin in the middle of the night. I believe their friendship and straining romantic courtship. Hansard and Irglová are not actors, but experienced musicians (Hansard fronts the Irish band The Frames), and the music in the film is spectacular. The scene when they sing their first song together in the music store that allows Girl to play their pianos during the lunch hour, captivated me completely. This wasn’t a flashy music video, but two honest, talented musicians sitting down with a piano and guitar, singing a song of incredible beauty in what amounts to one long take.

Once is a spiderweb of a film in that each part — the performances, the directing, the acting, the songs — support each other part. The acting wouldn’t be the same if the songs fell flat, but the songs work so well because Hansard and Irglová truly fit their roles. The movie is tight and efficient and doesn’t make a wrong move. Its ending comes as a surprise, but it was absolutely the right choice. Because Once tells the most universal of love stories — guy meets girl — it could have never made it out of a cliche. The specifics of its characters and the music they make together help Once feel original and nothing like any story I’ve seen before. Perhaps that is the best compliment of a fable or genre film: it is like everything I’ve watched and like nothing I’ve seen.