‘Once’ Movie Review0

‘Once’ is an Irish inde­pen­dent film that is sim­ple yet bril­liant. It is a movie-musical between 2 musi­cians set within the streets of Dublin, Ireland. Written and directed by John Carney, this nat­u­ral­is­tic drama stars Glen Hansard, from Irish band The Frames, and Markéta Irglová as strug­gling musi­cians. Set in the streets of Dublin, this film is shot in a way that replaces ele­gance with effi­ciency. It does not look, sound or feel like your usual movie-musical such as Dreamgirls, Hairspray or even the crit­i­cally acclaimed Moulin Rouge. It lacks flashy effects and splashy grandeur that is evi­dent in such films. Once is more toned down and opposes the usual stereo­types of movie-musicals. It’s a gor­geous and straight­for­ward film that endows itself in a lov­able charm that films such as Moulin Rouge could never achieve.  Once’s for­mula for suc­cess is sim­ple: two peo­ple, a gui­tar, a piano and a whole lotta awe­some, sin­cerely per­formed songs. The open­ing of the film dumps the view­ers right into the mid­dle of the streets of Dublin. It is straight­for­ward that Guy (Glen Hansard), is a busker. There is no fancy intro­duc­tion or street full of dancers to dance to his music, it’s just him, his gui­tar and a small comedic mis­un­der­stand­ing between him and a drug addict. The next scene shows him still singing in the night. This marks the begin­ning of the show­case of his song­writ­ing tal­ent in the film. He stands there and sings Say It To Me Now. As he reaches the cho­rus, the cam­era dol­lies in shak­ily to him. Many peo­ple would pick on the poor cam­era work here as the dolly is a lit­tle bit shaky, but I would rather con­cen­trate on the essence of this film, its music. When he hits the cho­rus, he sings extremely loud in the mid­dle of the street, as if let­ting out a shout of despair. The despair in his voice cou­pled with the lyrics gave me chills. That’s the actual beauty of this movie. It doesn’t force feed us with the emo­tions the char­ac­ters are feel­ing. But rather it makes us accu­rately infer it through the voice of the actors, the music and the lyrics. Moreover, the way it intro­duces the female char­ac­ter, Girl (Markéta Irglová) is rather straight­for­ward too. After the dolly in, it dol­lies out slightly and reveals her lis­ten­ing to his singing. This starts the whole series of events that hap­pen in the movie. Apart from the story and the music, the actors were really con­vinc­ing in their act­ing. They did what they were sup­pose to do and didn’t over dra­ma­tize their char­ac­ters. Both Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová have no prior act­ing expe­ri­ence. However, both of them had worked with each other through Glen Hansard’s band, The Frames and penned most of the songs in the film together. And the song Falling Slowly won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. The sound­track also got nom­i­nated for two Grammys. The sim­plic­ity of the film has eas­ily made it one of the best low-budget indie films in the last 25 years. Its blend of com­edy and romance is hard to for­get. It’s a film that can be watched repeat­edly and not get sick of it. – Fong Chan Teng