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Trailer for "Once"

The most bebuzzed movie to come out of Sundance this year (it won the World Cinema Audience Award), the Irish film Once is a musical about…okay, I guess we can’t just leap past that part. It’s unfortunate that this unassuming little movie is being referred to as a musical, a term that brings an entirely incorrect set of assumptions to bear. Musicals are fantastical, lavish and archaic, people singing to the accompaniment of invisible orchestras and visible dancers who spring from nowhere. To the extent that Hollywood still makes them, they tend to be ironic (Moulin Rouge) or faux documentary in character (Dreamgirls). Once has songs through which characters express emotions, but otherwise has next to nothing to do with anything you would ever call a musical. Think of Hustle & Flow with folk-pop instead of rap and you’ll get the idea. On the streets of Dublin, a 30-ish busker plays Van Morrison songs for the afternoon crowd and his own compositions at night. (The nameless character—“The Guy,” in the end credits—is played by Glen Hansard, singer for the popular Irish band the Frames; he is also the composer of the songs.) One of his personal ditties, which spring from a severed relationship with a woman who moved to London, is heard and appreciated by a young emigrant woman (“The Girl,” Markéta Irglová, a Czech musician who co-wrote some of the songs). They chat, discover a mutual love of music, collaborate a little, get to know each other. The subject of sex is broached and discarded: Neither one of them is quite unencumbered. They raise money, rope in a few local backing musicians and make a demo tape. And that’s about it. Once benefits from a sense of place (working-class Dublin) filmed in vérité style by someone who knows it. And while the two leads are not professional actors, they have a connection to the music that the film probably couldn’t have done without. Because the songs are the basis of the story: They were written first, and writer-director John Carney (a former member of the Frames) concocted a plot to link them. Fortunately the songs are uniformly gorgeous, with melodies that would be the envy of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke presented in stripped-down arrangements that make you wonder why any band would ever want more than four instruments. I can’t say I was as charmed by Once as many viewers have been, but I do plan to buy the soundtrack album.