Once, full of light

Oddly, the last two movies I’ve seen have had more or less the same storyline: impoverished street musician suddenly finds success but suffers many personal losses along the way.

The first was La Vie en Rose, a biopic about the French singer Edith Piaf. It was long — 140 minutes — and as violent a film as I’ve seen in years. I don’t mean there was a lot of shooting or blood (though there was some of both), but it was relentlessly loud and dark and hopeless. There was tons of screaming, drinking, fighting, and hysterical weeping. The only peaceful scenes were of a jaundiced, dying Piaf and even those included shattering glasses and angry words.

There’s no denying, Marion Cotillard did a spectacular job playing the blighted French singer. And La Vie en Rose was told in a layered mosaic style that worked beautifully, evoking life as we tend to remember it: random memories, tenuously connected, that aggregate over time to form a history.

One might argue that it’s “truer” than the second movie I saw: a sweet, short Irish Sundance winner called Once. And technically, it is. But I take another point of view, that what’s important is a lucid view into the making of great music. And in that sense, Once is the far better film.

Granted, this is a fairytale of a movie. There’s actually a scene in which the street busker and his rag-tag band are cutting a demo album while a two-year-old runs gleefully around the sound studio. I’ve had two-year-olds [three of them] and you can barely make toast when they’re around and upright.

Nevertheless, this film is wonderful. It’s quirky and sad and nearly prayerful: everyone in it is visibly lifted, exalted, made more whole by the music. And, yes, the music is that good.

On a strictly emotional level, Once is real. Its stars, playing simply “the guy” and “the girl” according to a script by director John Carney, are an Irish and a Czech musician (Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, respectively) whose voices simply light up our world. In the story, they sing together for the first time in an empty music shop and everyone — from the clerk, who is leaning on the counter eating a sandwich, to members of the theater audience — goes still. Listening.

There are those, I’m sure, who prefer the music of Edith Piaf to that of Hansard (lead singer of The Frames, one of the most popular bands in Dublin). She was an undisputedly great artist and an important figure in French cultural history. Given this, however, there’s a falseness to La Vie en Rose that bothers me. Piaf did have a stunning voice, and this comes through in spades. But the rest of her life was, according to the film, nothing but ugliness: poverty, degradation, betrayal, abuse, and addiction.

I’ve no doubt all these things happened. But I also suspect there were moments of lightness in her life — the ones that allowed her to sing as she did. Only at the very end of the film, around minute 118, was there even a glimmer of humanity and by that time, it was too late. When Cotillard as the beleaguered and weary Piaf got up and sang “Non, je ne regrette rien” (translated: No, I regret nothing), I didn’t believe it: she should have been regretful if this account was accurate. She had used, cheated, laid waste, and destroyed. I left the theater bleak despite Piaf’s glorious voice, vaguely angry that so much bitterness had been stuffed inside me.

Where Once may err on the other side, portraying life as twinkling and hopeful even in the grayest of circumstances, it does music justice. Watch the scene in which a jaded studio technician, stuck working with a no-name band, listens to them for the first time, his face washed with a craggy wonder at the sound coming from the motley group. Or the one in which the working-class father grins after he listens to his son’s completed album, full of a quiet, aching pride. These alone are worth your $8.25.