There Once Was a Singing Blackbird
Again I must, against my natural instincts, join with the roaring crowd, this time about Once, John Carney’s tiny, modest little-Irish-movie-that-could, which thoroughly bewitched me with its simplicity, its grown-up assumptions about adult behavior and history, and most of all the music, which had a sincere, keening urgency to it that I’d never encountered in a musical before, or even rarely on Fordham’s WFUV. It may be a film that’s impossible to dislike, despite the fact that it’s formally and visually the cruddiest movie released to American screens since Chuck & Buck. But as with Miguel Arteta’s film, it hardly mattered – the honest glimpse of lost humanity did the work. It’s also, for what it’s worth, a perfect answer to what-happened-to-the-musical: instead of attempting to reconstitute the naive tropes of the 30s-60s musicals, tropes which were themselves leftover constructions from vaudeville, Once integrates the songs into the action realistically, not only with the timeworn-but-sensible let’s-put-on-a-show numbers, but also otherwise – as with the exquisite long travelling shot of costar Marketa Irglova, playing a down-trodden version of herself, walks home through Dublin at night listening to a song by her new friend (Glen Hansard, also a sorry version of himself) on earphones and singing her own lyrics to it as she goes.
You pick the film apart if you like, but it seems clear, even objectively, that the raging bulk of the film’s sympathy and modesty far outweighs filmmaking particulars or even a distaste for weeping folk songs. But, on the other hand, am I responding to the film or the music? Is there a difference? Without those songs, with some other singer-songwriter’s songs, Once might’ve been a forgettable ditty – but can’t we say the same thing for a Isabelle Huppert performance, a Vittorio Storaro camera job, or an Ennio Morricone score? Actually, I suspect that I might not have cottoned to Hansard and Irglova’s songs at all had I heard them independently, sans the film’s context and the stars’ terribly likable, endearingly sad on-screen personas. The movie may be song-dependent, but the mesh of a movie’s experience comes in a vast variety of densities and textures and fibrous ingredients. Why would the songs of a musical be not, as they say, essentially cinematic? I had the experience, and I’d rather not be a piker and tear it up.
Another experience I’ve had, barreling through the upcoming DVDs: Balint Kenyeres’s "Before Dawn," a 13-minute Hungarian short featured on the due-in-September Cinema 16 set European Short Films. Call it a stunt if you like, but Kenyeres performs a Kalatozov/Jancso/Tarkovsky/Angelopoulos/Tarr/Sokurov triumph in surveying the pre-sunrise events in a grassy Magyar valley, trucks and refugees and police and helicopters and hidden surprises, all in one stupefying 35mm shot. A beautiful balls-of-your-feet immersion in real time, the film is, of course, like the features of the long-shot mentors mentioned above, also about our viewing anticipations and desires, a questioning of our usual viewership omniscience (and, frankly, laziness). You come to know that valley as you know few filmed locations, and in under a quarter-hour. The DVD set has 16 shorts altogether, ranging from the fabulous to the pleasantly gimmicky. But Kenyeres’s stood out like a peacock.
In other news: my review of No End in Sight in this month’s In These Times.
Before Dawn is available to watch online here">http://festival.sundance.org/2006/watch/index.aspx">here.
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I thought of two things when I read this: one, when I interviewed Carney, he said: "It’s amazing how you can put a song over an image and you think the song was written for that image, but it wasn’t. You’ve just married those two things and come up with a third thing." I think that third thing is the performance, the thing we fall in love with (or not), and when you separate them it no longer exists.
When I listened to the soundtrack later, at home, I still thought of the images in the film; but I realized that those images had led me to expect a quite different ending, while the songs themselves supported the actual ending.
The other thing I kept thinking about was Guy Maddin's "The Heart of the World," which moved and delighted me more than any other short film I can recall seeing. I have only seen it once, but my memory of it is as much aural as visual, it's merging of the two quite brilliant. It's my favorite of all his films.
Jeannette
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It's a damnably impressionistic thing, to be sure -- the combo in Once's first piano-shop scene between the song's plaintive expression of the Hansard character's heartbreak, and the simultaneous renewing communion the two of them discovered, playing and watching each other and following each other's key changes, laid me out in a way mere musical numbers, or, God forbid, musical interludes, never had before.
And for the Maddin -- yes, yes, yes: the thundering meta-Soviet marching theme...
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