John Carney’s Once
“Once” is a beautiful and breath-taking vision of low budget film-making, truly reinvigorating the artistry and passion that comes with making a film out of love and care rather than financial gain and blockbuster monotony.
It tells the story of an unnamed Busker that meets an unnamed flower girl with a passion for piano and begins an uplifting relationship with her, with the events of their relationship and obvious chemistry culminating in a decision to record an album together.
Technically “Once” is a musical, but it has a sense of tender charm and natural storytelling that upholds it to a new, fresh expression of a musical that I will praise unwaveringly. It’s a very modest and very personal film that doesn’t lay into the cheesiness of a standard musical style, but injects it’s own minimal flair in order to bolster the surrounding scene, and in every circumstance, pulls this off wonderfully.
The beauty of the film is that the main actors are all comprised of real musicians playing their own personally made songs, there are no voice-overs and no taking the focus out of the characters in any way. The whole film feels very closed in and the ease of the musicians playing their roles made me feel pleasingly empathetic for the characters and the situation that they’re in. The musicians themselves are incredibly talented and very passionate about their music, it comes out amazingly in the final product and remains a powerful and driving force in the film’s satisfying model.
The camera-work is wonderfully inventive for the low budget that “Once” works under, there are no grand set pieces, no brilliant technological luxuries, not even use of a steady camera for the most part. Carney’s cinematic eye is built on keeping the focus in and together with the characters, playing out much like a student film, but with the occasional change in shot and angle of the camera placement, Carney brings this basic style to something much more satisfying and resonant, a very unkempt charm mixed with a constantly reviewed precision.
There were scenes in this film that were mind-blowing to me, with the unbelievably commanding musical score coming in boldly and passionately, and the silent background cinematics, I felt a mild sense of awe in being a part of something so beautiful, if just for the moment of the scene. I very much appreciate Carney’s vision and the wondrous raw emotion of his craft that plays out in “Once” during such scenes that I will gleefully revisit this film for many a time in future.
For anyone who might be jaded with the cut and draw original musical style and all it’s flashy glamour, and wants to see a romance devoid of the mushy fairytale formula, but that plays more into the natural and realist expression of a brilliant romance while remaining meaningful and inspirational, I implore you to see “Once”. It might be one of the best musicals that I have ever seen, and that means a lot coming from it’s humble beginnings.
The trailer itself only shows the tip of the iceberg, there is a deep and very powerful sense of emotion that flows through this film, and only watching it in full will show you that.
(I apologise for not putting up a review here for some time, but I really like to limit myself to films that very often go undeservedly unnoticed by no fault of their own, and this was my first perfect example of that lately.)
