The Pagan Agenda

Rating:

John Carney’s ‘Once’ plays out like a passionately conceived mix-tape of a lover or friend, a thing of intimate purpose and vicarious delight. After a long stale summer of disappointments I once again realize why it is I enjoy going to movies. Live music, perhaps more so than any other art form, can electrify a room and make the many whole; when reproduced on film and situated narratively as ‘Once’ does the effect can be even more intense. Not surprisingly, few original musician-on-the-rise storylines are tried or successfully executed (‘The Commitments’ and ‘8 Mile’ stand out as the rare exceptions) due largely to the fact that it becomes all or nothing with this sort of venture, for neither the music nor the screenplay alone can compensate enough if the other is lacking; the music is a conduit to the character and vice versa, neither has much resonance without the other to buoy it. The strain of keeping a balanced dramatic narrative going via the collaboration of the two mediums is enough to scare most talent off, and often when the musical is attempted it is done under the auspice of lighthearted escapism, requiring little scrutiny so long as things are light, bright and poppy. The musical genre has ebbed and flowed according to this lucrative mean, rarely straying.

‘Once’ demonstrates that a healthy dose of realism now and then in the musical genre can be a profoundly moving experience. One needs only to succeed at perfection in every way: perfect compositional control of the interplay of music and visuals, character and performance, perfect actors who can sing, emote and improvise, perfect songs and corresponding dialogue that enrich one another through a common honest goal. There are so many ways that this film could have failed but it kept going, unwavering in its conviction. For me something dormant awoke, some lost chamber of understanding (perhaps a remembrance of the teenage preponderance of music – having music in one’s veins). The ricochet of sound of a worn-out guitar and the twinkling of piano keys, the croon of folksy ballads, all seeped in and this movie had me at hello. All the built up anxieties of going to the cinema melted away, everything once again made perfect sense in the art-experience scheme of things.

The story begins on the streets of Dublin where a lonely busker and a feisty Czech admirer chance upon one another and pursue an ambiguously symbiotic relationship blurring the line between musical collaboration and romantic sentiment. The complexities of their relationship are offset by the fluid ease of their musical harmony, and in many ways this is a film about experiencing life vicariously through music. Lengthy sequences bear witness to the kinetic spontaneity of music-making, and at times the film takes on the trappings of music videoes and performance documentaries. Pieced around these musical set-pieces is the meandering love story which never feels forced. ‘Once’ has an almost improvisational quality to its love story, and much like the voyeurism involved in watching the intimacy of music-making and performance there remains a similar tacit enjoyment to watching the tussle of feelings and minor inflections born in every bit of dialogue of the film.

The principle actors of the film are in fact professional musicians albeit of far less notoriety than what is sure to befall them in the aftermath of the film’s success. At my showing I counted three different groups of people leaving the theatre humming along to the songs, and it was only a matter of hours before the soundtrack was bought by my wife. The music is so stand-alone great and so well-received it becomes a strange phenomenon where one wonders if it is a film that consequently promotes the soundtrack or a soundtrack which promotes the film. Regardless, as musicians the principle actors Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova have great chemistry (an almost Thom Yorke/Bjorkian air to them), and it is a rare fortune of the film that as non-actors they remain equally compelling as characters, using their personality quirks (whether acting or natural, it is so good I could not tell) to summon the feeling more so than through clever dialogue.

In other musings on cinema I brought up the notion of Tacit Cinema, well brother this is it. The joy is in the underpinning immediacy of every moment, the electricity of improvisation, the resignation of character development to the inexpressible pleasures of performance, to the auras of the actors as real people, the seeming effortlessness to the whole project, the life …to risk overstatement and poetic hysterics…but the life of it. This often goes unmentioned in reviews and yet it is such a pivotal part of cinema, at least to me, and which is here bountiful. There is a beating heart behind the folk music of ‘Once’ and behind the love story, and it is a genuine relief to be reminded of its potential in both music and cinema. I almost forgot.

Listen for yourself: