If music be the food of love...: Once

...let Once play on.

Ever since I heard ‘Falling Slowly’, I knew I wanted to watch Once. That it won an Oscar for Best Song was only coincidental as far as I was concerned. Once is a small-budget film – at least, as small-budget as films go in the big, bad world of studio filmmaking. The camera, for example, shakes ever so slightly through quite a bit of the film. It is disconcerting as first, but as we continue to listen to the film’s songs, sung and performed so evocatively by the lead characters as the story progresses, we cease to pay attention to that detail.

Set in Dublin, Ireland, Once trails Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, both real-life musicians who also feature as the lead actors, as they meet, make music and learn a different love over the span of one week.

Music IS this film. I’m used to Bollywood films being considered strange if they don’t have at least five songs in them, but for a non-Bollywood film to be so much about music, and yet not a musical in the true sense of the term, was refreshing. It isn’t just ‘Falling Slowly’ that is a pleasure to listen to.‘Fallen from the Sky’ and ‘When Your Mind’s Made Up’ are beautifully composed and written as well, and even something like ‘Broken Hearted Hoover’ is fun. Full marks to Hansard (lead singer of the band The Frames) and Irglova, a Czech singer and songwriter, who bring life to the story as a busker and music-loving immigrant in Dublin respectively.

Interestingly, the film’s characters don’t have names. In the end credits, they are only referred to as ‘Guy’ and ‘Girl’, and this steers the film all the more towards its songs, which are what the two characters live and breathe. It doesn’t matter, really, that they don’t have names. As they introduce each other to their respective instruments (he the guitar, she the piano), they slowly draw out the music and lyrics in each other that existed, but never came to the fore.

Long live independent cinema, I say. We need more of these simple, uncomplicated stories that somehow make you remember that it is the simple things in life that matter.