Once: film review
Once (2007) is one of those small, spell-binding, heart-breakingly sweet films that don’t come along very often and are gone again all too soon.
What makes it different to everything else out there? For a start 1) It’s a musical and 2) It’s Irish.
Glen Hansard—of well-known Irish Rock band The Frames—plays thirty-ish ‘Guy, the kind of invisible busking musician you’ve probably walked past a thousand times on the way to work and never given a second thought. Scraping by and living solely for his beloved music, he’s beginning to wonder if he’s wasting his time and what the future may bring, if anything at all.
Then he meets a young Czech flower seller—played by actress and singer / songwriter Markéta Irglová—towing a broken hoover in need of repair and they hit it off; soon they start to hang out together, and Guy realizes that there’s more to the girl than immediately meets the eye. She can play music and has a beautiful voice; so they start to collaborate on the demo that Guy wants to make before he moves to London to make it up with his girlfriend. But will he move to London? There’s an obvious attraction between the two but Once keeps us guessing, never taking the easy route out.
Made in 17 days by Irish director Joe Carney and a hand full of people, Once is full of the kind of things that make life tick: there are the happy moments, the tragic failures and all the insignificant little things in between. Most impressive of all is that neither Guy Hansard or Markéta Irglová were trained actors. Before getting to print, financial backing collapsed several times, with the director eventually forced to fund the project partially himself—Guy agreeing to the project, as long as he had full artistic involvement—with the rest of the funding coming from The Irish Film Board.
Strangely enough, just as the director predicted, the pair ended up becoming a couple in real life.
Seek Once out if you want a good romantic story and you love good honest music.
Now for the work update, if any of you are interested, check out the new illustrations that just went up for banner stands. That was my skilled hand at photo editing!