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A busker falls for the naive charms of a Czech immigrant in John Carney and 's lyrical love story

4 out of 5

Writer and director John Carney says he wanted to make a "visual album" with Once , and the result is an innovative piece of musical cinema. Casting musicians rather than actors in the main roles and telling the story for the most part with songs rather than dialogue, he ties film and music together to make something that looks and sounds nothing like a conventional musical.

Glen Hansard is the lead singer of Irish rock group , and here he plays a Dublin busker with holes in his guitar and a sad song in his heart. When he meets a nameless Czech immigrant girl (Irglová) and befriends her, they begin to play music together and a tentative but tender relationship blossoms.

Any film that has two people breaking into song in a silent music shop requires the boundaries of realism to be stretched; Hansard and Irglová as the eccentric Czech girl carry it off with a captivating charm. There's a happy naivety to their acting that makes it clear they are not professionals, and the pair make a virtue of their obvious inexperience. For example, Hansard strums out a song on his guitar, which Irglová listens to once and the two promptly knock out a cracking duet. It sounds like a scene from 'Fame', but it's so effortlessly and naturally performed by both actors that it appears strangely unaffected, and is quite lovely to watch. This lack of affectation is accentuated when characters on screen glance into the camera, their quick flashes of recognition giving the film an almost documentary sense of reality. Hansard brings such personal charisma to his role, and such intensity to the songs, that there's a sense he's not really acting so much as presenting himself to the camera.

Carney wrote the script for Once at the same time as Hansard wrote the music, with the two sharing their work and drawing ideas and inspiration from one another. In that sense the music really is as important as the story, and as the characters develop so too does the music, becoming more complex and complete as the characters continue to play together. Beginning with Hansard singing along to his battered old guitar, he is joined by Irglová and her piano. Eventually the pair put together a full band in a studio and there's the sense that we've witnessed the whole development of Carney's visual album, from initial ideas through to the polished end product.

As important as the music is, the performances that the actors give should not be underestimated. The script consciously avoids the usual clichés of love stories. The charming performance by the two main actors that elevate this film above the level of musical concept nonsense and into something far more human and engaging.

Verdict

A rare innocence and a fresh approach to filmmaking make this a thoroughly charming and unconventional love story. http://www.film4.com/reviews/2006/once

By Devin Faraci · 05.16.2007 · Movie Reviews

Once is the kind of movie that ruins it for other movies. Once isn’t just a nearly perfect little film, it’s effortlessly so, and you walk out wondering why more movies can’t just be this good.

Glen Hansard, who sings for the Irish band The Frames in real life, is The Guy, an Irish busker on the streets of Dublin. The luminously beautiful Marketa Irglova is The Girl, a Czech immigrant who sells flowers and plays the piano at a music shop on her break. Neither Hansard or Irglova is a real actor, but combined with director John Carney’s minimalist DV camerawork, they instill the film with a powerful sense of truth. The press materials for Once are vague on the relationship between the two in real life, beyond talking about their musical collaborations, but after watching this movie I can believe they’re soul mates – the love is right there on the screen.

Much of that love comes from the beautiful music the two make together. Once is, believe it or not, a lot like Hustle & Flow – not in actual plot or characters, but in the way it uses music as the prism through which all other narrative elements pass. Once is a modern musical, which means no one just breaks out into song (although there is one tracking gorgeous tracking shot where Irglova is singing along with music on her headphones as she walks down the street that is tantalizingly close), but rather that all the music comes from these two playing and writing together. Like Hustle & Flow , Once gives its protagonists a shot at a recording studio, and that process is compelling magic.

Irish readers have informed me that Hansard has become a hipster target in recent years, but I’m happy to be blissfully unaware of anything about him besides his performance in this film. He’s got a charming and rumpled presence, and his style seems to be somewhere in the Van Morrison/Nick Drake side of things. He’s a guy worth rooting for. Irglova, meanwhile, has completely captured my heart. Where The Guy is a bit of a slacker and sort of goofy, she’s responsible and tough, and yet vulnerable enough that you want to protect her (even after she’s driven a remarkably hard bargain for a weekend in a recording studio). The whole film depends on these two, and they make every frame sing.

Carney’s script is as minimalist as his camerawork, and he wisely avoids big, dramatic, romantic moments. The romance is in the small things, in a bus ride or a duet at the piano. I evoked Billy Wilder’s statement that a love story isn’t about what brings the couple together but what keeps them apart in my Knocked Up review a couple of months ago, but it’s really appropriate here, as Carney keeps the two just apart enough to drive the audience nuts. Too often I’ll sit through film romances and not feel a thing, or even worse not care whether or not they end up together; Once keeps you on the edge of the seat waiting for that first kiss. Never gushy, never sentimental, never pandering to your cheapest emotions, Once earns every lump in your throat and every tear on your cheek.

A beautiful movie with wonderful music, Once is easily one of the best films of the year. This summer is packed with bloated special effects films that spend pallets of cash trying to recreate reality while in Once John Carney and his actors have done just that with almost no money at all. No matter how many pirate ships or undersea monsters Gore Verbinski crams onto the screen in Pirates 3 , there’s no way his film will have a single moment that’s as lovely and affecting as all of Once . I’m sure that Once will get lost in this summer’s maelstrom, but I guarantee to you that this film will, in a few years, be regarded as a small classic. Discover Once now.

9 out of 10 http://www.chud.com/10229/review-once/

Once December 24, 2007 By Roger Ebert

I'm not at all surprised that my esteemed colleague Michael Phillips of the Tribune selected John Carney's “Once” as the best film of 2007.

I gave it my Special Jury Prize, which is sort of an equal first; no movie was going to budge “Juno” off the top of my list. “Once” was shot for next to nothing in 17 days, doesn't even give names to its characters, is mostly music with not a lot of dialog, and is magical from beginning to end. It's one of those films where you hold your breath, hoping it knows how good it is, and doesn't take a wrong turn.

It doesn't. Even the ending is the right ending, the more you think about it.

The film is set in Dublin, where we see a street musician singing for donations. This is the Guy (Glen Hansard). He attracts an audience of the Girl (Marketa Irglova). She loves his music. She's a pianist herself. He wants to hear her play. She doesn't have a piano. She takes him to a music store where she knows the owner, and they use a display piano. She plays some Mendelssohn. We are in love with this movie. He is falling in love with her. He just sits there and listens. She is falling in love with him. She just sits there and plays. There is an unusual delay before we get the obligatory reaction shot of the store owner, because all the movie wants to do is sit there and listen, too.

This is working partly because of the deeply good natures we sense these two people have. They aren't “picking each other up.” They aren't flirting — or, well, technically they are, but in that way that means, “I'm not interested unless you're too good to be true.”

They love music, and they're not faking it. We sense to a rare degree the real feelings of the two of them; there's no overlay of technique, effect or style.

They are just purely and simply themselves. Hansard is a professional musician, well known in Ireland as leader of a band named the Frames. Irglova is an immigrant from the Czech Republic, only 17 years old, who had not acted before. She has the kind of smile that makes a man want to be a better person, so he can deserve being smiled at.

The film develops their story largely in terms of song. In between, they confide their stories. His heart was broken because his girlfriend left him and moved to London. She takes him home to meet her mother, who speaks hardly any English, and to join three neighbors who file in every night to watch their TV.

And he meets her child, which comes as a surprise. Then he finds out she's married. Another surprise, and we sense that in his mind he had already dumped the girl in London and was making romantic plans. He's wounded, but brave. He takes her home to meet his dad, a vacuum cleaner repairman. She has a Hoover that needs fixing. It's Kismet.

He wants to record a demo record, take it to London, and play it for music promoters. She helps him, and not just by playing piano. When it comes down to it, she turns out to be level-headed, decisive, take-charge. An ideal producer. They recruit other street musicians for a session band, and she negotiates a rock-bottom price for a recording studio. And so on. All with music. And all with their love, and our love for their love, only growing. At one point he asks if she still loves her husband, and she answers in Czech, and the movie doesn't subtitle her answer, because if she'd wanted subtitles, she would have answered in English, which she speaks perfectly well.

“Once” is the kind of film I've been pestered about ever since I started reviewing again. People couldn't quite describe it, but they said I had to see it. I had to. Well, I did. They were right.

4 out of 4 http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071224/REVIEWS/237678516

Movie review: 'Once'

By Michael Phillips Tribune movie critic

May 24, 2007

4 stars (out of four)

The Irish musical romance "Once" is so beguiling I didn't realize until after a second viewing how infernally corny writer-director John Carney's film might've turned out in lesser hands. It's a very small piece, working in a deceptively casual storytelling style. But it's my favorite music film since "Stop Making Sense," and it's more emotionally satisfying than any of the Broadway-to-Hollywood adaptations made in the last 20 years.

The potentially infernally corny plot: The sweet son of a vacuum repairman has a life outside the shop as a busker, accompanying himself on guitar for passersby on a downtown Dublin thoroughfare. One day he meets a Czech woman selling flowers on the same street. She's a pianist and fledgling writer herself. After playing and singing together in a music store the man asks the woman to help him record an album before he heads off to London, where an ex-girlfriend awaits.

Then comes a happy ending, though necessarily the one you expect. It's about the happiest happy ending I've seen in a movie in years. I love it. I love pretty much everything about "Once."

Glen Hansard of the Irish band The Frames (very big there, with a sizable international fan base as well) plays the unnamed guy. Marketa Irglova, 18 years his junior, plays the girl, also unnamed. Though Hansard appeared in "The Commitments," a film as fake-hearty- bogus-Irish as "Once" is authentically charming, he's not a professional actor. Nor is Irglova. The way Carney handles their friendship, which is both a love story and a music story, you couldn't ask for a more wonderful pair.

There's nothing technically special about "Once." Carney and cinematographer Tim Fleming keep their setups extremely simple, using lots of variable, off-the-cuff telephoto shots, so that the central relationship really does seem to be developing naturally as part of the street scene, on the fly.

The first number Hansard and Irglova share, the music shop sequence, provides the hook for the film, characterized by Carney as a "video album." As they play and sing one of Hansard's songs, you can feel the click, the connection. Carney doesn't point it up with a lot of idiot closeups or emotional cues. He shoots the scene in long, patient takes. The way he and editor Paul Mullen lay in one brief insert--that of the music storekeeper taking notice of what he's hearing--you realize that every decision regarding "Once" and its vibe, its storytelling, was the correct one.

No film exists in a vacuum. In some ways "Once" plays out like a French New Wave film on the cusp of Jacques Demy's "Umbrellas of Cherbourg." That makes it an Irish French New Wave Film, I suppose. As in "Cherbourg," working-class characters go about their lives, singing. Unlike "Cherbourg," the style is anything but traditional break-into-song. Once or twice in "Once" Hansard sings in a way that could be mistaken for sung dialogue, but even that is so deftly handled you're never thrown out of the conceit.

For reasons they'll have to go to hell for someday, the Motion Picture Association of America ratings board gave "Once" an R, for a handful of swear words. Ignore that. And enjoy the film. http://chicago.metromix.com/movies/review/movie-review-once/163467/content