I don't know you but I want you
A piece of trivia that always makes me smile: at the 80th Academy Awards, my beloved Enchanted somehow earned three of the five Best Song nominations. And yet Alan Menken still went home empty-handed: The statue instead went to “Falling Slowly,” a tune from a tiny Irish indie sung by the actors who wrote it. The Academy gets plenty wrong, but here they got it right. If I was ranking the aughts’ great musical moments in movies, that duet from Once would be near the top of the list.
The scene works so wonderfully both because the tune is gorgeous and because it’s the movie in miniature, performance and love: Two strangers who go unnamed throughout the movie, but are credited as Guy (Glen Hansard) and Girl (Markéta Irglová) — so I unfortunately have to use those as their character names in this review — lean over a music shop piano, she playing keys and he strumming his beat-up six string. He talks her through his composition written in a notebook, then starts playing and singing. She joins in. They grow more confident, more in sync, with each measure. As their music braids, their gazes do, too. Harmonies and soaring choruses click into place with the heart-racing thrill of discovery and possibility and belonging: It’s a first kiss in musical form. It’s swoony and unguarded without ever tipping into cheese. Much of the spell is the brilliantly preserved diegesis: every note is happening right there in the room. Compare it to the High School Musical series of the same era (which, to be clear, I love): A school cafeteria snaps out of reality into theatrical artifice and choreography like it’s Broadway come to life. Once is the opposite. The voices and instruments are unprocessed (or so subtly processed you can’t tell), and thus the feeling of the performance builds organically and beautifully to its apotheosis.
Once’s story is small. Hansard’s busker fixes vacuums by day and plays his guitar on Grafton Street by night; Irglová’s Czech immigrant sells flowers. She hears him one day, and the next carts her busted Hoover into his shop. They start talking music, and she nudges her way into his songs, making him believe they can do more than gather coins from passersby. The pair begin to collaborate, drifting through Dublin’s music shops and kitchens and late buses, recruiting a few fellow street performers. The film never inflates this into a fairy tale. Between Guy and Girl is the blossoming romance that must stay unspoken due to Girl’s life circumstances, but which is always tugging like a melody you can hum but has no lyrics.
Director John Carney shoots the entire film on a shoestring production on location in Dublin, his hometown: Handheld DV cameras capture the lo-fi footage. Everything is lit by practical light. Real street clatter and background noise from the city fill the soundtrack. The lo-fi textures are not cinematic but intimate, and put Once in the vicinity of American “mumblecore” of the mid-2000s. “Mumblecore musical” sounds like a contradiction; Once demonstrates how moving and inviting it can be. (Shoutout to Damien Chazelle’s debut, too.) Just like the best mumblecore movies, Once captures little unstructured curvatures in life and adult romance. Carney certainly overuses shaky-cam, letting it be a stand-in cue for the concept of authenticity when a tripod would have helped matters. But the overall approach yields one beautiful sketch and grace note after another: the close-ups feel stolen, the performances uncoached.
None of it would work if the acting didn’t land, but they do. Hansard, all scruff and soft eyes, brings a shambling earnestness that keeps Guy from drifting into sad-sack cliché; Irglová, grounded and wry, plays Girl as more pragmatic, pointedly blunt at moments. You feel their comfort from their first shot together, an extended zoom-in on Hansard in which Irglová seems to materialize from nothing. Watch how quickly they settle into each other’s tempos. Neither is a trained screen actor, and that’s why it works so well: They carry themselves like civilians, not stars, which gives their attractions and retreats a shy, tactile, painfully real quality.
Because the music is theirs, written by the performers and presented with minimal safety net, the songs carry a documentary intensity. I’ve already praised “Falling Slowly,” but the film is filled with performances that bring out the characters and their emotional landscapes as much as the script does. Another highlight is “When Your Mind’s Made Up” which is especially powerful because it comes at a moment when everything is on the line. Some of the songs even play out in a single take, and each is apportioned generous runtime for a rather short movie, meaning the performance really is its lifeblood.
The story also has a thread of class reality running through it. These are artists for whom money is an ever-present boundary, and the grind of working class life is the most likely outcome. Girl has rent, groceries, responsibilities; Guy has a wonderfully sweet father who owns the shop he works at, and backs him even if he doesn’t quite understand him. When Guy and Girl lift each other, it matters not because they’re destined for stardom, but because it provides oxygen for the cinders in their heart, igniting the possibility of rising into something beautiful when everything around you would keep you down.
Once was the breakout film for Carney, a musician-turned-filmmaker. The production almost fell apart when Cillian Murphy backed out, which scared off a couple of producers. Hansard stepped in reluctantly. But the film came together and earned mostly raves, culminating in its Oscar win. On its back, Carney built a reputation for bittersweet, musician-forward stories where musical performance and the plot are one and the same. This is the first of his movie’s I’ve seen, but I’ll definitely check out some more.
If there’s a problem with the film, it’s that the spare style can feel almost allergic to big movie moments, banking everything on that bootstrapped naturalism. But even this restraint becomes part of the film’s thesis. Once prefers the half-smile to the grand gesture, ambiguity to happily ever afters.
The ending, true to that ethos, is tender and unresolved. No fireworks, no Broadway kiss; just two people whose lives have overlapped long enough to change each other. The title is a promise and a boundary: some romances last barely longer than a pop song. But the best pop songs, like the best romances, shape our feelings and evoke an eternal feeling even when they’re gone.
The minor miracle of Once is how perfectly its parts fit together: lo-fi form for a street-level love story; songs authored by the characters in places and moments that feel genuine, because they are; non-actors whose slight self-consciousness reads as genuine nerves and uncertainty. It’s a movie of small stakes and big feelings, but, thus, big stakes. Its two-pence production and slight story and wounded-heart tone will put plenty of people off, but for me there are few joys in cinema more moving than watching this Guy and this Girl on the streets of Dublin falling slowly.
Is It Good?
Exceptionally Good (7/8)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.