VIDEO: The trailer for Once
Some people are confused when they talk about musicals. They’re thinking of the recent ersatz kind — some of which have won Academy Awards. Me, I think of Gold Diggers of 1933, The Gay Divorcée, Singin’ in the Rain. And maybe I’d include in that list Once, John Carney’s rough-hewn but crafty, rousing but melancholy tale of down-and-out Dublin musicians.
The story recalls Rent, with struggling urban artists falling in love. Many hated Rent because it’s removed from any reality and because the performers are detached from the performances. Or maybe that’s why they liked it. Like Chicago and Dreamgirls, it’s all razzle-dazzle cooked up in an editing room.
Humble though it seems, Once has the grand ambition of restoring real life to the musical, or vice versa. It’s not the first such effort. Jacques Demy tried something like that in 1994 with his sui generis Les parapluies de Cherbourg|The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. And in 1991, Alan Parker’s The Commitments told the rousing but melancholy tale of down-and-out Dublin musicians. Glen Hansard, founding member of the Frames, plays one of them. In the last scene of Parker’s film, he’s busking on Grafton Street for change.
Jump-cut 15 years and you have Hansard opening Carney’s film — only the currency has changed. He’s an unnamed Dublin singer-songwriter (some call this overly U2; I find it engagingly Van Morrison) who plays the lunch crowds but whose real job is working in his dad’s vacuum-cleaner-repair shop. His best songs spring from the usual lost love, but the attention of a headstrong 19-year-old Czech émigrée (Markéta Irglová), a single mom with a sad story and a yen to write songs, spurs his ambition. To retrieve his lost love in London, perhaps, or cut an album. Maybe both.
Carney shoots this familiar scenario on location with pseudo-vérité handheld photography. The performances (neither lead is a professional actor) feel improvised and authentic. As for the way characters burst into song in the midst of a naturalistic narrative, the presumed classic-musical stumbling block for modern audiences, well, singing is what they do.
Which raises a different kind of problem. Overcoming audience resistance to the unlikely intrusion of a transcendent musical realm into the everyday is what provides the genre with its magic. Without resistance, there is no triumph. Carney’s solution is to have his protagonists overcome the indifference or the hostility of bystanders, like the bank officer who in the end not only approves their loan but shares some tunes of his own. Or the jaded studio engineer who realizes that these two might be special.
But special for each other? They’re from opposite ends of the spectrum — somewhat. She plays Mendelssohn on the piano; he doesn’t recognize the piece but finds it “good.” Otherwise, they have a lot in common. Her father is dead, a suicide. His mother is dead, cause unknown. She lives with her mother; he lives with his father. Both are poor. Both have artistic dreams. Both draw from broken hearts for their deepest inspirations.
Will true love still find a way to be thwarted? This is Ireland, after all. Nonetheless, she drifts closer to him while walking the streets with his demo playing on her headphones. She adds lyrics to his tune and the sequence is like a solitary, 21st-century version of Fred and Ginger merging in “Night and Day.” Can they pull up roots and move to London and start a glorious new creative life together? In the real world, I can almost buy the idea of music erupting from the daily grind of life. But happy endings, that’s another matter.