DVD REVIEW: "Once"

Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova on the streets of Dublin in "Once"

One of the many charms of "Once," an anti-musical musical, is that it doesn't seem planned out ahead of time. The film appears to be unfolding right before our eyes as though the characters themselves have no idea what the next day will bring either. The people in this movie don't seem to be acting, they seem to be living.

This may be a new, much-welcomed trend in movie musicals, something to separate them from their stage counterparts. Earlier this year, I saw a film very similar to this called "Colma: The Musical," in which the characters didn't burst into song, the songs burst from the characters. And like "Colma," (and unlike those "big musicals" like "Hairspray," "Chicago" et al), "Once" is about people who, even if we don't know folks exactly like them, it's very likely we could. It is also like "Colma" in that its story doesn't take us in traditional directions, but in the directions of real life. Also like "Colma," the location of the story is as much a character as the people are.

The location for "Once" is the streets of Dublin and the first scene of the movie shows us a guitar-strumming angry pop/folk singer (Glen Hansard) in the Van Morrison tradition on those streets singing for loose change and trying to keep a junkie from stealing that change. His anger in these songs is directed at the girlfriend who cheated on him and then moved to London. One night he happens to meet a Czech girl (Marketa Irglova) who also makes her living on the streets selling flowers. She likes his songs and, in talking to him, learns he works by day in his father's vacuum-cleaner repair shop. Just so happens she has a vacuum cleaner that needs to be repaired.

OK, that sounds manufactured, but it really isn't. There's not a manufactured moment in this film. That's the beauty of it. Look at the recent "Hairspray," for example. As delightful as its opening scene is, you are never, never, never going to find a teenage girl bounding down the streets of Baltimore or any other city singing like Nikki Blonsky does in that sequence. And, if you do, she will not wind up in high school classroom, she will wind up in a strait jacket. In "Once," however, the songs happen when songs would naturally happen. One of the best scenes in the movie has Hansard and Irglova (the characters in this movie are not given names) in a music shop where she is allowed to practice her piano playing and they work on their first musical collaboration as she accompanies him on one of the songs he has written.

Another deceptively beautiful moment comes when she purchases batteries for a portable CD player and then walks home singing to one of the songs on the CD. Writer-director John Carney films this extended sequence exactly right, with only one edit, so that we live the moment right along with the enchanting Irglova. Many of the movie's other tunes are heard as they are recording a demo Hansard wants to take to London where he hopes to win a record deal.

Do the two of them fall in love? Of course they do, but their love affair does not take the normal course of traditional love stories. Instead, it takes the course love stories of this type would more likely take. Carney makes no attempt to turn this into a fairytale.

One of the songs in this movie is called "Once" and I guess it's from that song that the film gets its title. However, I prefer to think the film was named because something this special comes along only once in a great long, while.

Grade: A