Film Review: Once

once
Originally uploaded by iomhanna.

This film won a prize a Sundance apparently. A down-and-out Irish singer-songwriter meets a struggling Czech pianist immigrant in Dublin. It's the old story, boy with emotional baggage meets girl with emotional baggage. They have good times, they fall out, they make music and well, I won't spoil the rest.

The star, Glen Hansard, has been around since the 1980s, with his band, The Frames. The film has the feel of 1980s Dublin, the crumbling buildings, the squalid apartments, the sense that the only way to succeed in life is to play music and move to London. Yet the co-star, Marketa Irglova, represents the new Dublin, shiny and prosperous where only Slavs live in squalid crumbling apartments.

Our Czech correspondent writes that the film shows Hansard's Czech influences:

"Hansard is very fond of Czecho. He bought a recording studio in Moravia apparently and a flat in Nusle. He has appeared on a fairly well known chat show here (via interpreter) where he claims the Czechs and Irish have a lot in common spiritually and musically and tells stories about how he bought one of his girlfriends a grave for her birthday so they could be bruried romantically together. Seems to be a affable chap who has made a few quid from playing run-of-the-mill music with great enthusiasm. Czechs love grainy gritty movies due to their cynical attitude to life. Top hits here are about depressed single mothers with bawling kids in which they'll calmly have a five minute sequence of her cleaning up the flat after her drunk boyfriend, while he snores with his mouth open on the couch after giving her a few belts and theres no sound except her whimpering and the clink of plates."

Definitely go see Once, for the music if nothing else.