Once (2007)

Not a story so much as an incident that becomes a turning point in two people’s lives, Once relates a brief but memorable encounter between a bearded Dublin street musician (Glen Hansard of the Irish band the Frames) and a young, ponytailed Czech pianist (19-year-old singer-songwriter Markéta Irglová).

He plays guitar on street corners; she notices his playing and is intrigued. She observes that he plays edgy, heartfelt songs only at night; he explains that he makes his money during the day from passersby who only want to hear popular songs they know. He works in his father’s vacuum cleaner repair shop; she has, yes, a broken vacuum cleaner. She plays piano, but doesn’t own one; a shop owner lets her use the store piano during lunch hour. They play together and collaborate on a song.

She is lovely; he is lonely. Both are wounded souls, and their connection is emotional as well as creative, but she has a clear, untroubled sense of who she is, and won’t let things go too far. We never learn their names, and never need to know. It’s not inconceivable that they never learn one another’s names.

Those are the notes, or some of them. What I’ve left out is the music. To call Once a musical is both entirely accurate and thoroughly misleading. It would almost be better to call it the antidote to the musical, or at least the antithesis, whether you love musicals or hate them.

If Once is a musical, then every musician lives in a musical, every painter in an art gallery and every film critic in a film festival. The actual folk-rock they play may or may not be your thing; it doesn’t matter. It’s their thing, and they live and breathe it. Nothing has been staged for our benefit; there’s no offscreen conductor or choreographer in the wings, no show-stopping production number, no artifice or razzle-dazzle. The unrehearsed quality of their first-time collaboration, of his impromptu, semi-comic musical lament on the bus, feels like the real thing. (It just about is. The film was shot in 17 days on a negligible budget.)

Watching Once, one may wonder what the title refers to. Is their chance encounter a once-in-a-lifetime experience? What is or happens once? Is it a fleeting once, like a convergence of celestial bodies? Or is it a lingering once, like true love? As the film draws to a close, it finds the one right note to resolve its lingering tensions. It could easily have gone differently, but it doesn’t misstep — not even once.

Like the personal songs the street musician sings at night, Once doesn’t play to the crowds looking for disposable mainstream fare. It comes from the heart, and for those with an ear out for something new it lingers in the heart and mind.