The cozy, quaint setting of the Eveningstar Cinema becomes John Carney's "Once" so perfectly that you may just overlook the artificial dialogue and occasional absurdity. This movie-musical hearkens back to a brighter era of cinema, when films shunned grandiosity in favor of genuine, warm emotion that brought with it a humanity now rarely seen.
A quasi-conventional love story that forgoes sex (and the trite Hollywood ending) and replaces it with passion and mutual affection between the two main characters?neither of whose names we learn?creates emotion not from amorous platitudes but from words unsaid. Neither the guy (Glen Hansard) nor the girl (Marketa Irglova) does well better than any average, confused, lonely person would manage off the screen.
But the emotion is there, scrawled over Hansard's knotted brow as he struggles to find the right words and hidden in Irglova's soft smile and loving insistence. They may not be eloquent, but their sincerity forges feeling stronger than the best-chosen words ever could. And, perhaps most of all, it's in the music?and here, "Once" yet again differs markedly from its movie-musical contemporaries.
The characters never look each other in the eye, share a profound vision, and burst suddenly into a song they have never heard before. Instead, they sit together with a piano and guitar, playing and singing songs that have taken them hours, days, weeks?sometimes even years?to perfect. The emotion, along with the music, rises to its climax as the two become increasingly sure of themselves, of each other, and of what they're doing together.
Until the main characters meet, both are lost and confused, lead stagnant lives, and obsess over past loves without doing anything either to move on or to reclaim them. Hansard spends his days working at his father's vacuum cleaner repair shop and his evenings singing at?not to?passersby on the street while strumming a decrepit guitar. The strongest reaction he elicits (before meeting the girl) is an attempted robbery by a intoxicated homeless man who tries to run off with the guitar case and whatever petty change it contains.
Irglova's life is, if anything, even less promising. Her apartment, which she shares with her mother, young daughter, and occasional neighbors who want to watch the only television in the building, lacks a phone. Her "career" of cleaning houses and selling flowers lacks prospects. Even her music depends on the kindness of a storekeeper who lets her play his pianos.
The improbable partnership that unites Hansard and Irglova's characters gives them their only purpose and means of communication. The film celebrates the grounded, earthly determination upon which any hope for happiness depends, the determination that lands them in a recording studio with a couple of street musicians and a skeptical acoustician who expects cacophony, not the terse, poignant verse provided him by this ragtag bunch.
The filming itself epitomizes this gritty drive. The hand-held camera Carney uses is never still, and the faint buzz of background static permeates the movie. There is no pretense or attempt to falsify or aggrandize the worlds the characters inhabit. We see these worlds?dingy, dimly?its apartments and all?as though we are directly involved, the occupants' delicate humanity heartwarmingly close.
And it is this closeness and emotional sincerity that raises "Once" above contemporary movie-musicals. Even if you don't laugh or cry, you will feel?feel the longing, the love, the inner struggles of its characters.