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ONCE
Written & Directed by: John Carney.
Produced by: Martina Niland.
Director of Photography: Tim Fleming.
Edited by: Paul Mullen.
Music by: Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova.
Released by: Fox Searchlight.
Country of Origin: Ireland. 88 min. Rated: R.
With: Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova.

An upfront woman (Marketa Irglova, 17 at the time) listens to a thirty-ish ginger-haired busker (Glen Hansard) strum his guitar and sing an angry ballad. She’s his only audience – most of the stores in central Dublin have closed. After he’s done, she asks if he stills loves the woman he’s singing about. As he will frequently do to avoid her interrogations, he shoots her a big grin and look away. But his emotions are transparent. He, like the film, wears his heart on his guitar strap, and mockingly describes himself, at one point, as “a brokenhearted Hoover-fixer-upper guy.” The next day, she returns to his spot, pulling along her broken vacuum as if it were a toy poodle.

A pianist with no piano, the Czech immigrant takes him to the showroom where she’s allowed to play. On guitar, he tries out another song for her. She joins in on the keyboard and harmonizes along with him, singing the words, “I don’t know you/but I want you/all the more for that.” Although they convincingly bring this lyric to life, she has an infant daughter and a husband back in the Czech Republic, yet she urges him to produce a demo tape of his songs, a project not completely unlike Mickey and Judy putting together an indie rock band instead of a Broadway show. (A bank loan manager also harbors dreams of rock stardom.)

In keeping with this tentative romance’s simplified, stripped-down approach, the duo are simply referred to in the credits as the Guy and the Girl. Often underlit and filmed with a handheld camera, Once’s look, oozing with indie cred, conceals a hopeful and sentimental heart, much in the same way Miranda July’s acerbic Me and You and Everyone We Know was also innocently wide-eyed.

Director John Carney was a bass guitarist in The Frames, with Hansard as the lead singer, and last year, Hansard released his first solo album, The Swell Season, with assistance from Irglova. This is her first film, and Hansard only earlier appeared in The Commitments. Both are unselfconsciously enduring. Goofily smiling and not knowing how to behave in front of each other, they flaunt their awkwardness, and their dialogue has a very loose, off-the-cuff but laidback quality. Harboring not-so-secret crushes, the Guy and Girl are temperate rather than ardent – but the music gives off the needed sparks.

The emo-oriented, folksy score may be the most memorable original film music in some time, sounding like the work of David Gray, more middle of the road than the rants of an aging alienated youth – even the Guy’s da thinks it’s brilliant. Through these songs, a gossamer of a story is smoothly tied together. In that sense, the film’s a musical, but like most original pop/rock scores for movies and even adventurous stage productions like Damien Sheik and Steven Sater’s Spring Awakening, the songs don’t propel the story in the way of a standard musical. Each number could easily be taken out of context and stand on its own as the lyrics are not specific to one character. But what the radio-ready numbers lend to the film is everything it would otherwise lack: ambiance and clues to the feelings of its shy and fumbling characters. Kent Turner
May 16, 2007