Once

There are a lot of ways in which Jim Carneys Once is a work of genius, but the one that I settle on is this: The film takes the husk of a standard love story, and plugs in people who don’t quite fit. And lets them go. This refusal to adhere to cinematic convention results in a movie that doesn’t contain even a whiff of contrivance. It’s fresh and free, and it doesn’t step wrong once.

When we first meet The Man (Glen Hansard) he is in the streets singing for change. As he strums away on a Van Morrison tune, his antenna goes up as a junkie starts milling around. When the guy grabs his money and runs, he goes after him. This is one of the first indications that Once is something special. Instead of beating the guy up, he lectures him that he`s ``Just trying to make a living``, and then says something you don`t expect. ``If you need money, just ask – Don`t make me chase you around."

The film cuts immediately to the same location later that evening, and The Man is now singing one of his own compositions. As he finishes, the camera pulls back to reveal that he has an audience - The Girl (Marketa Irglova). This is the meet cute that we hear talked about, but this one is different. The Girl is pretty straightforward with him, asking him about the girl that he wrote the song for. He says that it`s nobody, and her response is simple and perfect:``Bullshit.`` The dialogue in this opening meeting is completely natural, and yet effective at starting to introduce us to two people. She`s cheerily persistent, he`s a bit aloof. When he chides her for only giving him a dime, she shoots back “So you do it for money”? He’s stumped by this response, but we already know he doesn’t just do it for the money. We saw that in the previous scene.

The two go for a coffee, with music being the entry point for a friendship, and we find that the Girl is a Czech immigrant and a classically trained pianist. We’ve already gotten the sense that they like each other, but in an early trip to a music store, things click into another gear. He wants to hear her play, and as she sits at a piano and plays a bit of Mendelsohn, the camera shows his face, and it’s an expression of admiration and awe. He is starting to fall in love with her, but it is more than that. He’s falling for her talent as much as he is for her.

Two subjects propel Once: Love and music, and it is impossible to isolate one from the other. The scene in the music shop involves the two working out “Falling Slowly” together, and it is as much a seduction as it is a musical collaboration. The scene could be read as using the song as surrogate lovemaking, as they tentatively learn their parts, move forward, and ultimately end up with a beautiful finished song.

I said at the beginning of this piece that these are two people who don’t quite fit into the plot that is provided for them. We’ve already gotten an indication that the Man still loves his lost girlfriend. When the Girl takes him back to her apartment, we see another layer of detail – She has a daughter, and in fact has a husband back in the Czech Republic. She is a little coy, however about her feelings for him. When the Man asks her if she still loves him, she answers in Czech and won’t translate for him.

It would be wrong to talk about this film and not talk about how it is informed by music. The Man is a talented singer-songwriter who is striving to make it in the music business. It’s not really spelled out, but his ultimate goal is to get established in music, then go and win his girl back. There’s a beautiful scene where he composes a song while watching old video of his girlfriend, and it is telling how the images dovetail with the pain and sadness of his lyrics. He has never gotten over this girl.

The Girl is harder to read. She says that the relationship with her husband is done, but she also says that she doesn’t want her daughter to grow up without her father. She plainly likes the Man a lot, but is not quite interested in a relationship. Early in the film, he gently suggests sex, and she shuts him down immediately. The unseen husband still exerts a pull on her.

The consummation of the relationship, at least the musical part of it, is a scene where they go to a studio to record the man’s songs. My favorite part of this whole movie involves the sound engineer assigned to help them. The guy is clearly only mildly interested in the process, and is quite possibly hung over. As they start into “When You’re Minds Made Up”, he puts his feet up on the console and starts to read the paper. At some point, however, it grabs him. There’s a definite moment when he takes notice of the music, puts down the paper and starts working on the sound board. When the song ends, he quietly asks “Did you write that?” That little question speaks volumes, because a guy who hears music all day long is giving his approval to the man who wrote the song. It’s a gorgeous, subtle scene.

If the recording session is the consummation of the musical relationship, it is also in a way the final word on the romantic relationship. We have already surmised that the Man is going to try to win his woman back, but it’s here where the Girl reveals where her heart lies, as well. After playing a beautiful piece on the piano, she breaks down, and the Man correctly deduces that it is something she wrote for her husband. In that little moment, we realize that this wonderful pair of people is not going to be together

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The romance is ultimately a bittersweet one. They are two people who like and care for one another, and would have ended up together if the circumstances had been different. Sad as it is, we have the thought that each of them is doing the thing that they should do, and that their die was cast before they even met. It’s s a bit peculiar that we don’t ever learn the characters names in this, and I’m not even sure they learn EACH OTHERS names. The film is putting a bit of distance between them. In essence, they are each a character from a different movie who crossed paths in this one.

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AllMusic on The Swell Season (Hansard and Irglova’s real-life band)