ONCE: Irish Film Week

ONCE follows a Dublin street musician and a Czech immigrant who meet by chance and begin making music together. Glen Hansard plays the unnamed busker, spending his days performing on Grafton Street and repairing vacuum cleaners in his father’s shop. Markéta Irglová plays a young pianist and flower seller who hears something in his songs that everyone else seems to walk past. Their relationship develops through rehearsals, recording sessions and long conversations about the lives they’re both trying to work out.

John Carney made the film on a tiny budget with musicians rather than conventional movie stars, and that looseness is central to why it works. Hansard and Irglová perform the songs themselves, often in full, and Carney gives the music enough room to become part of the drama rather than decoration. Dublin appears as a lived-in city of buses, music shops, small flats and late-night streets, while the film avoids forcing its central relationship into the shape of a conventional romance.

I’ve included ONCE because Irish Film Week needs music, and because this is one of the clearest examples of a small Irish film travelling far beyond anyone’s reasonable expectations. It’s intimate, funny and emotionally direct without becoming sentimental. It also gives the week a completely different rhythm after the black comedy and chaos of ADAM & PAUL and INTERMISSION. Irish cinema is often associated internationally with politics, rural landscapes and dark humour. ONCE shows another side of it, built around Dublin’s music culture and the possibility that two people can change each other’s lives without necessarily ending up where a more conventional film would put them.

ONCE became an extraordinary international success. Made for a fraction of the budget of most commercial features, it travelled through festivals before finding a large global audience. “Falling Slowly,” written and performed by Hansard and Irglová, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, while the film itself became one of the defining independent music films of the 2000s. It later inspired a stage musical that went on to win eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical. What began as a small Dublin production ultimately became one of the most internationally recognised Irish films of its generation.