When Two Worlds Collide- Once – A Film Review

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Once, starring Glen Hansard, Marketa Irglova, 2007   

Everybody, everybody who lives in cities, or who takes public transportation to the city has seen some straggly, snarling, struggling guy playing guitar, playing it well or poorly but playing it to rise above the din of city noises, and singing. Singing covers of some popular tunes, some tunes which will get we damn busy heads down travelers already late for something to listen up for a minute. Singing and strumming, well or poorly, but always with an open guitar case for the “thank you kindly” donation that allows him to survive, to breathe, to write his lonely ballads, and to keep the wolves (read: landlord and other bill collectors) from his door. What you probably didn’t know, unless of course you are among the seven people in the world who still listens to and supports folk music, roots music, street music or whatever you want to call it,  that those nameless guys (and gals) have stories to tell. Have the usual array of problems and dreams like the rest of us.

Problems like love, marriage, kids, lost ones, and dreams of making it off the streets and into the music studios and then… That back story, both the problems and the dream parts, are what drives this film under review, Once, about the connection, for a moment in time as it turned out, between a guy street musician in Dublin (that's in Ireland for the heathens) and an immigrant girl wannabe musician (immigrant in the days when, for a minute, Ireland stopped being a place to get bloody well out of going across the sea to Liverpool or across the pond to Amerikee and was a place to go to dream).          

Under normal circumstance such a boy meets girl saga, would seemingly pose no problems for them getting together. There would almost have to be (and was) a natural attraction. But that is where the back story gets complicated, complicated just like for the rest of us. First off the guy was still pining away for his muse-girlfriend (Irish) who betrayed him with another lover and who was off in London. Secondly the girl, a Czech national, was married, married with a child, a little girl, (and with a mother in tow) whose estranged husband was back in the Czech Republic. What draws these street urchins together is the love of music. His rough-hewn plainsongs of sorrow and lost and her more delicate wistful attempts to make sense of a world through song (and piano) that is kind of passing her by.

But to the music, the all- consuming music that is really the star of this film. A great deal of its time is spent with the pair alternately flirting and creating something like a demo CD to shop around in order to get their big break, the one that will right their lives. That music, which by the way was written and sung by the actors who played the boy and girl (Glen Hansard and  Marketa Irglova), got a work-out here as he or she would burst into song at command. But in the end the two worlds, the world of the muse-driven (and career-driven as well) Irishman and a young immigrant woman looking for a father for her daughter as well as the music just couldn’t mix, couldn’t stand the huge effort to put those two worlds together. Couldn’t stand the collision. As so they went their separate ways.  How is that for a back story of that straggly, snarling, struggling guy you see at that subway stop every workday morning.