‘Once,’ the season’s indie sleeper, returns

Volume 2, Number 13 | The Weekly Newspaper of Chelsea | Dec. 28, 2007 - Jan. 3, 2008

"Support businesses and organizations that support Chelsea Now"

holiday film issue

Once
Written and Directed by John Carney
Now available on DVD

By Steven Snyder

Given its low-key style, and its sweet sentimental side, John Carney’s “Once” was an easy film for movie writers to overlook this year, a grassroots Irish phenomenon that arrived on American shores with little pomp or fanfare.

However, before 2007 is filed away in the history books, it’s worth taking note that “Once” has quietly became the year’s little-movie-that-could, the indie hit of the moment that took New York by storm. Measuring a NY theatrical run not in weeks but months, the movie floated from one art house to another, and when it closed for the last time in the East Village in early November, long lines were still returning to its charms. Even more remarkable: The entire film, shot on location Dublin using digital cameras for a mind-bogglingly slim $160,000, has pulled in nearly $10 million of business in America alone (with an additional $5 million in international ticket sales). That’s a return on investment of more than 6,000%, all before hitting DVD stores this week.

The movie stars two musicians, which perhaps explains why the music was so good, and why the soundtrack went on to become one of the year’s most popular. And not just any musicians, but Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, the two musicians who collaborated on the 2006 album “The Swell Season” — Hansard’s first — during the same time period in which the movie was being filmed.

As such, there’s some intangible quality about “Once” that makes it seem more genuine, more gripping, more believable — that art is in many ways imitating life, as a story about two bonding musicians parallelling that actual real-life bonding of two musicians, collaborating on a first work.

Carney leans heavily on this chemistry, and the duo’s explosive musical talents, as he strips away from the film all frills or film effects. From the very first scene, he sets a naturalist tone: On a Grafton Street in Dublin at twilight, a street musician sets down his guitar case, and starts singing one of his original songs. Without a passserby to ask for tips, without anyone in earshot to hear the tune, Hansard plays with all his might as Carney watches from afar and ever-so-slowly inches closer. And something about this moment — a real musician, not lip-synching to a soundtrack but belting out with all his heart — hooks us instantly.

It is as far removed from the razzle-dazzle of “Hairspray,” from the careful stylization of “Sweeney Todd” as one could image; just a man, his guitar, and the thrill of lifting one’s voice into the air. As the story progresses, he meets another struggling artist who, like him, is stuck somewhere between her passion and paying the bills. While Hansard works in his dad’s vacuum store, Irglova, playing a Czech immigrant, sells flowers to those cruising the shopping district. But when a visit to a local piano store brings out her talents, the two decide to scrape together their money and record a demo.

As the two grow closer as collaborators, so does the sexual tension, but there is something impossible about their love, between a broke vacuum repairman still struggling to get over his ex-girlfriend and a floundering immigrant who is raising a child on her own, that gives “Once” a heartbreaking quality.

Even though both Hansard and Irglova seem to realize that their love could never be, that life has simply made things too complicated, Carney wraps the last third of the film around their time together in the studio, devoted to that one perfect weekend, isolated from the outside world. And in these scenes, their music literally does speak louder than their words ever could, conveying the emotions, the longing that they would never say outside the booth.

Here again, “Once” bucks the trend. More about the music than the editing, more about the lyrics than the props, and more about realistic characters in believable situations than about creating cogs to fit a feel-good Hollywood formula, it’s a movie that stands in stark contrast to the bland, big-budget musicals threatening to destroy the genre. Now on DVD, fans are in store for a few more surprises, among them a free download of the movie’s central theme: “Falling Slowly.”