Once

Year: 2006
Running time: 85 minutes
Certificate: 15
Language: English
Screenplay: John Carney
Director: John Carney
Starring: Glen Hansard, Markéta Irglová, Hugh Walsh, Gerard Hendrick, Alaistair Foley, Geoff Minogue, Bill Hodnet, Danuse Ktrestova

A chance meeting on the streets of Dublin leads to a
strong new friendship.

Once is the little Irish film that took the world by storm, and it’s really not hard to see why. It's a simple story about two strangers becoming friends via a mutual love of music and developing an achingly romantic relationship that never quite blooms as it might have had this been a more traditional romance. Guy (Glen Hansard) works in his dad's (Bill Hodnet) vacuum repair shop and busks on the Dublin streets in his spare time. Guy meets Girl (Markéta Irglová), a Czech immigrant who convinces him to fix her vacuum cleaner.

Guy is struggling to put together a demo tape to take to London, and it turns out that Girl is an accomplished musician in her own right, so she helps him put together his demo over the course of a few days. Girl is married with a young child, her husband still in her native country, so Guy's romantic advances are soon shut down with a heavily-accented "no hanky-panky". The bond that develops in place of the usual is arguably deeper and more meaningful, and gives the film a lovely heartfelt bittersweet feel that very few Hollywood efforts are able to manage.

Guy and Girl struggle to define their feelings for each other.

Casting musicians instead of actors in the lead roles (Hansard fronts Irish guitar band The Frames and Irglová is a singer songwriter first and foremost) was a very clever move indeed, because it makes all of the songs throb with a passionate vitality that actors who happen to be able to sing could never hope to match. It turns out that Oscar agreed, awarding Best Original Song to Hansard and Irglová for Falling Slowly. There is such a genuinely lovely chemistry between the leads that the developing platonic relationship that simmers with unreleased longing is entirely believable.

The ending strains the limits of realism just a tad - I’m not quite sure about the fact that although they are both very poor, they can somehow afford to buy expensive instruments like pianos on a whim. That said, the surprise present at the end just when the relationship appears to have come to crushingly disappointing nothingness, is simply wonderful, and, although completely different subject matter recalls the emotional sucker-punch ending of About Schmidt.

A lovely musical romance that does the heart good.

Score: 7/10

Although I think rather highly of Once, it seems others rate it even higher than I do; see this review from A. O. Scott at the New York Times and this 9.5 out of 10 review from Edward.