Irish sort-of-musical ‘Once’ strikes a chord at Sundance

PARK CITY, Utah - From its first screenings here at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, the micro-budget Irish film “Once,” rejected by many a festival en route to Park City, generated word-of-mouth bordering on euphoria.

It’s a marvelous film, described by writer-director John Carney as “a musical, maybe.” It may well be the best music film of any stripe since “Stop Making Sense” a generation ago, and yes, that includes “Chicago” and “Dreamgirls.”

“Once” stakes out its own storytelling realm, midway between concert film and conventional, break-into-song musical. Its simple story tells of a Dublin busker, played with great, unforced charm by Glen Hansard of the band The Frames. (The band tours internationally through May.) The street musician meets a Czech-born street vendor (Marketa Irglova). The busker’s girlfriend has gone off to London; the vendor, who also plays piano, supports a daughter and a mother and has a man back home. The guitarist and the pianist write and make music together, record an album, tip around the edges of a romance and then go on with their lives.

That’s about it. And that scarcely describes the kind of happiness “Once” instills in an audience. (Moviegoers should be able to see and hear it for themselves later this year, depending on who picks it up for American distribution, and when.)

Shot in under three weeks for less than $150,000, funded entirely by the Irish national film board, Carney’s so-called “video album” made the stars and the director the toast of Park City. A rough cut of “Once” played at two festivals last year, one in Galway, Ireland, the other in the Czech Republic.

Carney: “Toronto turned it down. Edinburgh turned it down. Telluride turned it down.

“Thank God, really. Sundance has been amazing for us.

“The younger side of the industry, the agents and some of the acquisition people, they’re responding to it. And then the major guys, who are just in town for a couple of nights - nice suits; you can tell immediately they’re successful film producers - are coming up to us and saying the film is brilliant. It’s very hard to figure out why, or what the secret recipe is.”

Hansard and Irglova were a bit dizzy from the Sundance reception, and not just because they were at 7,000 feet above sea level.

“Overwhelming. I didn’t sleep at all last night,” says Hansard, sitting as upright as possible, poolside at the Marriott. “I rang my mother at home this morning, just wondering if everything was OK. I had one of those strange nights where you’re not really sure what’s up, you feel like something’s vaguely wrong.

“And she says to me: `You know what it is, Glen? Everything’s going your way, and you’re just feeling guilty about it.’”

Carney developed “Once” in mind for established actor Cillian Murphy (“Red Eye”), with whom he had worked on a previous feature, for Universal, “On the Edge.” But seeing the 36-year-old Hansard (who was in Alan Parker’s film “The Commitments”) and Irglova, all of 19, together onscreen, it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the roles. The whole picture has an airy, just-making-it-up quality. Shot on digital with handheld cameras and long lenses, it resembles a documentary or an early French New Wave picture.

Carney acknowledges that “my first films were all about trying to rip off Truffaut. And then I suppose I grew up a little bit and realized I had to find my own voice. And then your influences manifest themselves in a much more unconscious way.”

Carney’s characters are getting by, but they’re not exactly emblems of the current Irish economic boom. Irglova, a Czech Republic native who says she’s “half-living” in Ireland at the moment, says “Once” is more an ode to “Dublin as it used to be a few years ago.” She misses that friendlier, more welcoming Dublin; the new, forbiddingly pricey one, she says, is becoming far too Americanized.

“Once” is a very small picture, and there’s a chance it could get lost in the marketplace once it leaves the bubble of the festival circuit. (Sundance programmer John Nein caught it at the Galway festival and became a fan.) On the other hand, Irglova says, it’s hard to argue with the waves of love greeting this unique music film, which really does feel like one for the ages.

When he made “On the Edge” in 2001, Carney had his shot “at becoming a proper filmmaker. And I didn’t love the experience. It wasn’t in the way of the angry director trying to get his way, it wasn’t that at all, but I just found it kind of soul-destroying and a bit disenchanting. I was trying too hard to make a film that would `break out’; I had too much of an agenda.”

“Once” does not feel that way. “We’re getting a really warm reaction to it everywhere,” Irglova says. “The response isn’t in any way intellectual; people are just responding with real affection.”