Flashes of Panic

There are many advantages to cities which I haven’t taken advantage of since we moved here. Tonight we finally hit one; we saw a movie which, so far as I know, is in pretty limited release. (Despite being a winner at Sundance, Yahoo! Movies links a 197x movie of the same name when theaters are showing it.)

I picked Once out of the lineup because the leading actor, Glen Hansard, is also the frontman for The Frames, who opened for Josh Ritter when we saw him at the Somerville Theater. That’s a reach, but it sounded like a good enough reason to pick the movie. (Hansard’s previous movie work is long ago: he was the guitarist in The Commitments.) The short synopsis is that Hansard plays a busker and sometime vacuum-cleaner repairman approached on the street by a Czech immigrant cleaning lady (Hansard’s sometime collaborator Marketa Iglova); she plays piano. As they tentatively get to know each other, it is mostly through music; their conversations cautious and guarded, the songs much less so.

The marketing for the movie is clearly pitching it as a parallel to Before Sunrise (which I admit I haven’t seen) but it’s really a musical in the way of a lot of old-time movies—with the characters breaking into song about every five minutes. That makes it sound incongruous, but the music fits the movie as though it was written for it. (I think some of the songs are longtime Frames songs, some are from Hansard and Iglova’s collaboration, “The Swell Season,” and some may have been written for the movie—but it’s not clear which are which.)

There are dozens of silly little moments which make it endearing—Iglova towing her Hoover around Dublin behind her, or the band which eventually backs their demo tape (They’re playing by Phil Lynott’s statue, and say cautiously, “We really only do Lizzy.”) Hansard’s Takamine (a very nice guitar for a busker) has clearly been played long and hard: he’s worn right through the deck below the sound hole, and the ribs show through.

I’ve never seen a musical movie work this well, particularly given the contrasting film of the year (Music & Lyrics.) It’s understated and underacted, with wobbly cameras and dark nighttime shots (hooray for daylight) but if it shows up near you it’s worth making time for.

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