Once

If Hollywood is producing brightly colored, candy coated children’s cereal and serving it up in boxes decorated with dancing leprechauns, then independent film producers are producing dingy gruel, served up in a dented wooden bowl. It hardly looks the same as what the big boys are making, and worse yet; it’s probably being served up by your weird hippie aunt who’s urging you to eat it because it’s healthy.

Film is brutally expensive to produce, and requires deep reserves of cash and talent. The screen is unforgiving of errors, and audience standards can be impossibly high. Hollywood can’t buy soul, but they can afford to airbrush out most of the flaws and occlusions. Conversely, poverty does not automatically confer authenticity. The only guarantee from a shoestring budget is muddy cinematography and a lot of shaky, indistinct edges.

Once in a while, though, that raggedy packaging contains a sharp, clear gem. Appropriately, Once, a humble Irish film directed by John Carney, is like that – so muddy at points that you want someone to switch on a light. However deep inside the murk is a sharp, clear-eyed gem with moments as sharply etched and vibrant as the Hollywood candy factory could produce.

The press notes describe it as a “modern musical.” but it’s really a simple love story told by a pair of musicians through their own songs. He is a busker who performs on Dublin sidewalks; she is a Czech immigrant working odd jobs to get by. Both of them have deeply wounded romantic pasts bound up in their music. The guy, played by a scruffy Glen Hansard, has a not-quite ex-girlfriend, who slipped away from him. The girl, played by Markéta Irglová, is separated from a husband who doesn’t understand her music at all and has a small daughter to look after.

The two leads are musicians first, playing and performing their own music, and actors second. Hansard’s songs are full of a raw passion, and sound like he’s channeling the late Jeff Buckley. Though he’s neither a splendid actor nor a tremendous singer, it’s hard to envision someone else performing these songs. Despite being standard-issue sensitive-guy songwriter laments, Hansard’s songs are affecting and haunting, and pleasantly linger in your ears for days after you hear them.

Once manages to play the shortcomings of low budget filmmaking as strengths. The unnamed main characters and the raw honesty of their music lay out the skeleton of the story. Like a nifty optical illusion, your mind can’t help but fill in the connective tissue with echoes of your own experiences with heartache. It’s a neat trick, turning the blurred edges that normally sink low-budget films into a reflective surface, and gently summoning up echoes of your own heartbreaks.

That trick only works because the two leads share a likeable on-camera awkwardness. Neither of them are all that good at being people, but as soon as they begin performing, they find themselves. The simple story sharply portrays how these two come together and in a brief period of time, help to heal each other. Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation tried to mine similar ground – an unlikely near-romance that becomes redemptive – and missed the mark entirely. That film trafficked in smirkiness, condescension, and hipster ennui while Once conquers less grandiose ambitions with a true heart.