The Beautiful Fraud Reviews “Once”

In honour of one of my favorite films of last year, today I am writing about music and its limitless capability to inspire emotion, hope, love and magic. Specifically I am writing about this is the context of my favorite musical of last year, Once, and discussing why I think the movie works so well.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like Once. The only people who don’t love it passionately are those whose expectations had been bloated unrealistically by friends who had told them it was the most amazing movie ever. I don’t think it was the most amazing movie ever, but I do think it was amazing, and for a couple of different reasons. Part of its charm is also its simplicity, so it is easy to oversell it. It is a movie about music, love and the impossibility of locking down feelings. If you lock down feelings they change (diminish?) and if you don’t lock them down there is always that delicious danger that they may change (diminish?) or indeed, go away.

It is an incredibly genuine movie. The characters are from all accounts almost playing themselves and the lead actor, Glen Hansard, wrote all the music and has been a busker in Dublin. It is the lead actress’ first movie. The rawness of the production values add to the story, and as a side note these two provided the only genuine moment in the Oscar telecast this year.

It is common knowledge how powerful music is. It’s also the only art form in which pleasure increases with every listening. I can see many movies two or three times, but after that I start to get bored. It’s the rare movie that you keep finding new meaning or pleasure after the initial viewings. In music, however, familiarity does not breed contempt, but pleasure.

I have been thinking about why this is, spoken to highly regarded musicians about it and have reached the following conclusions. Music, if it’s done well, lets you be a participant. It does not limit your imagination by prescribing anything, but sets your own wheels spinning. When you see a character personified on the screen that inevitably becomes who you see as that character. And the character is the same for me, for you and for everybody else. Yet play a piece of music about the character and everybody can envision them in their own way.

Music can also be deceptive. Because of that very limitless-ness, it can promise you, the listener, heights that life can never deliver. It can colour a whole world with love, hope, potential and magic. I have become so obsessive about various pieces of music at various points in my life that I have felt panic as they start to end because that protected, magical world is ending. That the feelings inspired by the music are ending with the music. And though you can play them again, there’s always that fear that this time they won’t take you to the place that they did last time. I feel like it is my glimpse into feeling how an addict might feel, which makes me know I must never every try hard drugs.

This is what what the music does in Once, it opens up limitless possibilities and lets you as an audience come in and be a participant. Going further, it coats the characters’ world with a gloss, a magic that the reality of their lives lack outside the music.

The story is quite simple. A very earnest and not all that attractive Irish busker meets an Eastern European immigrant. They are both musical and they come together to play music. The music they play is their love story, though they never even kiss. I think it’s incredibly important that they never kissed, because if they did kiss that kiss is now limited by reality, whereas when it only exists in imagination the possibilities that might be contained within that kiss are limitless, like the music they play.

Early on, they go to a musical-instrument store, where the girl likes to play the piano. He teaches her one of the songs he wrote and hopes to record professionally, and as they begin to play, with him singing ”I don’t know you/But I want you/All the more for that,” the scene becomes about either musicians finding each other’s musical soulmates or a lost boy and a lost girl finding each other. What is so amazing about this scene and so many others in the movie is that the audience doesn’t know, and the characters don’t know whether the connection is purely musical or more than that. It means that the stakes are very high for what happens when the music stops.

Another notable point about this movie is the trust it places in the music to be able to carry it. When I think of other musicals I have seen recently, during musical numbers there is often fancy camera work, over the top costuming and scenery, fast paced editing and other distractions. This is a movie that believes in the power of the music, and allows that music to hold focus and by doing so foregrounds the emotions that the protagonists are feeling. Those emotions are so seductive, and not easily definable. Is what they are feeling simply a result of the ephemeral transience of harmonic rapture or is it real love? Love that exists only when the music plays is different to love that makes you have a life together. That tension and the fear that their feelings would end as the music does caused me to hold my breath to try and hold onto that moment forever.

This all only works because the music is awesome. Every time I hear it, I recapture that place I was in, hoping for them to be together but dreading that they would because then the fantasy, the limitless potential of their unsullied love affair would be coloured by reality.

Doesn’t everybody have one of those in their life? An unrequited love who you nurture in your imagination, breathless at the limitless possibilities but secure in the knowledge that the reality would never begin to approach the potential and could only disappoint. Someone who hangs your stars and your moon?

Perhaps it won’t surprise anyone reading this if I divulge that I loved a musician fiercely. Once.

Buy Once on DVD at Amazon.com!