Movie Review: Once

I don't often talk about movies in this blog. I don't really pay attention to new releases these days (I have my own six-month-old "new release" to chase around the flat). So Once took me by surprise. I didn't watch the Academy Awards, and it's only now, still reeling from viewing Once on DVD, that I am finding out how much recognition this film actually received.

In case you, like me, have been living under a rock for the past year or so, I'd like to recommend this film, and say that it should have won an Oscar for Best Picture.

Once had little to recommend it as an instant personal hit. It's set in Ireland, true, but not in the romantic past. The characters are clinging to the underbelly of the Celtic Tiger, and their poverty is not of the picturesque shawl-and-donkey-cart variety. They are the people we brush past in the big city as we pretend look elsewhere: an Eastern European girl peddling flowers; and a scruffy street musician with a beat-up guitar. When these characters leave the busy street behind at the end of the day, they go home to spaces that exude authentic poverty: there is the clutter of near-worthless items, the narrow bed, decorations that are faded and cheap.

Beyond anything else, this movie is Real. The film is shot in a grainy, homespun style that deepens the sense that we are eavesdropping on another's life. There are no melodramatic camera tricks; you are simply somehow in the middle of these people's lives, drawn into the action by sheer human kinship. There is no heightened drama for the sake of drama. The most pivotal moments are, if anything, underplayed. They slide by, the way real life slides by. As the two main characters get to know each other, you feel party to their loneliness, their assumptions, their anticipation, to the simple poignancy of lives that are neither glamorous, nor romantic, nor easily-resolved.

And, improbability of improbabilities, this terrific movie is also a musical.

If you watched the Oscars, you know this already: Once won for Best Song. And rightly so. These are two musicians--the guy plays the guitar, and the flower-selling girl is an excellent piano player. With her on keyboards, and her help composing words to some of his tunes, the guy's music blossoms and starts to look like it might go somewhere. The songs are liberally scattered through the film, and--get this--they are never extraneous to the plot! When these people sit down to sing and play together, something happens, so that by the end of the song, things are not as they were before. Life has shifted; we know something new. Lyrics and melodies propel a developing relationship, or they illustrate the depth of an old heartbreak. In this story about musicians, music drives the story.

Today, the next day, I am still haunted. I want to know what became of my friends from the night before. I want to see them again. And I also don't want to. I have that funny aversion that comes when you face someone after too much revelation. I feel the way you feel around someone who has said too much; I feel that awkwardness that descends after an acquaintance confides something too large for a relationship to bear. This impression--that I have witnessed real lives, in all their gawky fragility--tells me that Once is truly a great film.