Once: The European, Indie, Musical

The wails of a broken hearted street performer mixing with the clacking of vacuum cleaner wheels on cobblestone set up for an indie movie that mixes and breaks genres. Jack Carney has been trying to make this film for his whole career, having made three or four other movies about two strangers connecting and revitalizing each other in Ireland. This is his best attempt, a documentary-like musical romantic comedy that disregards tradition and embraces real life. The remarkable thing about Once is that it seems that Carney could have picked these characters off the Dublin streets, and followed them around for a few weeks with a Handicam, and this is the source of its greatest strengths and largest downfalls.
Commonality is the name of the game here as the curtain is raised on a dime-a-dozen aspiring musician, and daytime Hoover repairman who lives with his father and his grief. He meets a Czech woman who harbors similar woes and they connect almost immediately on a musical and emotional level. The story and characters are very basic, so it’s all down to music and character chemistry. Here we find success with catchy, if generic, heart-broken music mostly made memorable by the characters’ passion and connection with the tunes they croon with furrowed brows and glossy eyes. And it’s during these mournful ballads that the characters bond the deepest, and it makes these sections very touching, whether its him recounting his life story on a bus via spoofs of metal and country music, or her finally showing her wounds through a private piano composition. While these scenes serve as the linchpin of the film, scenes of pure absurdity (including an apologetic hug from a winded, thieving heroin addict) keep the tone lighthearted, and keep the film from taking itself too seriously. Interspersed between these extremes are depictions of unadulterated, European joy with family and friends, each portrait shot like a child’s first birthday party and scored by the music the two main characters performed together. These retain and highlight the healing power of friendship, even if your friend is someone you just met.
The everyday quality of the characters and their relationship is reinforced through cinematography, an unorthodox choice to have their dialogue fade into that of the crowd as they walk away down a Dublin street, and their own histories and actions are endearingly realistic and awkward. It’s a refreshing detour from the grand Hollywood, James L. Brooks love stories, but some may find themselves missing the sappy lines and grand gestures of amour, with boom boxes raised triumphantly overhead. This film takes the complete opposite route, in concept close to Breathless: The Musical, and it works well. Connections with characters and their pasts are easily forged and you find yourself caring deeply about them and their decisions even though you never even learn their names. The ending is tender, the music is catchy, it’s funny, sappy in a realistic way, and does very well in making a musical not about the music but about expression, and a romance not about love, but rather healing.