Once

Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

Once is one of those amazing films that looks terrible, is acted terribly, and has a music score that is kind of awful, but combined makes such an original statement about integrity and love, that you can’t help but applaud the holistic concept and ending product.  This tour de force is certainly part bravery, tempered by a creative drive founded in low-budget desire to make a movie.

With characters going by generic names like Guy and Girl the film focuses on the music and expressive relationship that flowers between the films lead characters played by Glen Hansard, and Marketa Irglova.  That may be cutting too much from the possibilities of the story, and re-thinking and possibly rewriting the script might have made it better.  It hasn’t seemed to hurt it, as there is now a Broadway adaptation selling out to adoring audiences upon winning 8 Tony awards.

Written & Directed by John Carney with Original Music by Hansard, and Irglová, Once feels like a low-grade documentary about Irish musicians trying to make it in show business.  This off-handed look to the whole thing, resembling at times poorly shot home movies, or vacation video, brings the whole thing down to earth and lets us right in to feel what these characters are experiencing. 

Writer/director John Carney got the idea for the film as he watched his musician friends toiling away in the backwater towns in Ireland and dreaming of getting to Dublin where the real business would discover them.  There are many rueful scenes in the film that any musician anywhere will immediately connect with including Glen Hansard’s Guy playing guitar on the street and having to chase down someone who steals his money.  Another surreal scene takes place in a financier’s office when musicians attempting to get a loan for a demo tape are subjected to the suit whipping out his guitar and playing his own music for the musicians.

Cinematographer Tim Fleming makes the most of his digital photography, smartly allowing the grainy nature of the medium to help tell the earnest story of Glen Hansard’s Guy, and Marketa Irglova’s Girl, whose relationship is something undeveloped and something that the film sees as needing to remain platonic in order for the narrative to work.  

The story will leave you wanting.  It is NOT a Hollywood story although we’ve seen so many of these kinds of flicks on afternoon TV.  It will definitely change the way you perceive what movies are today, and may even warm your heart a little, and put a smile on your face.

Recommend this product? Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good Date Movie
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older