You CAN See It Just Once... Because It Will Stay With You Forever

            What is the difference between song and speech? Both, when well done, can be eloquent, elegant, powerful, and beautiful. Both can implant an awareness of truth in the psyche of the listener. Both are expressions of humanity. The difference is that speech is an expression of the mind, while song is an expression of the heart. “Once” is a song manifested in film.

            The opening scene is of a scruffy, red-haired street musician (Glen Hansard) with a face not entirely unlike a basset hound’s, strumming a- for lack of a better word- threadbare guitar. In hot pursuit of an oddball who has just snatched his daily earnings, he hands his instrument to a passerby, imploring him to “hold this for a second”. The chase ends with the musician offering the stolen cash to the troubled thief who embraces him and asks how his mother is doing. The musician’s mother is dead. The movie is, of course, set in Ireland.

            We never learn the musician’s name. Nor do we learn the name of the young Czech mother (Marketa Irglova) whom he befriends. In fact, we know almost no more about either of them than they know about each other. They first meet abruptly in the streets of Dublin, but unlike most hopelessly romantic movies featuring European artistes, their love affair is not whirlwind, undying, or in any way steamy. “Once” is the story of two people who were right for each other in the right place, at the right time.

            We learn that the musician is/was in love with a woman whom he has long been parted from. We learn that the mother is nineteen and married to (though not in love with) a man back in the Czech Republic. But their personal lives are not important. What is important is music. The immediate, fleeting notes that are never heard the same way twice. The musicians who cannot say what they feel for each other, and who do not have to because their instruments say it all.

            They are an undeniably cute couple. We want them to be together and so do they, but we know in the backs of our minds that their relationship can’t last forever… and so do they. It’s not about physical love and it’s not about romance and it’s not about sacrificing everyday life to be with that special someone forever. Because at the end of the day, we aren’t living in movie land where our children and long lost spouses and financial worries and lonely parents all disappear when we find the person who we want to ride into the sunset with.

            “Once” is one of those movies that only requires one viewing to prove its point. Now can’t last forever. The present will always become the past. But, as the Irish are very proud to state, the past makes us who we are today. As we live in the present, we are creating our past and in doing so, crafting our future. It may not make much sense, but neither does love… or the Irish.