Raise Your Hopeful Voice

There was perfect weather today for the drive out to the St. Charles Mall. There was light rain, intermittent heavy rain and by the time I got back to my neighborhood, the sun took over once again.

Kim and I got a sitter and went to see Once. My sweetie’s reaction as she wiped away a few tears and composed herself was: “Honey I’m glad you know people who know what good things are or we would’ve never seen this movie.”

Priceless.

Thanks Bill Garver for telling me about this Geln Hansard guy, his band the Frames and this movie. I think the most precious moment for me came in the credits when I saw there were only three camera operators and one of them was John Carney.

John Carney happened to be the director.

Hansard’s shitty Takamine rent (in the sense that it had a bunch of fucking holes in it) guitar should also get a nod for best supporting actor in a non-human role.

Making films like this or writing songs like this is a very brave thing to do. These men are clever and talented. They could easily get in the business of looking cool or sounding new and covering up their bullshit with their considerable skills and artifice. The choice to write the songs for Once and to make a film like this is a conscious decision, a way that artists put their thought and feeling on display – honestly and see if the world will call bullshit on them.

There’s no ‘this is what I was trying for’ loophole. Yet the movie and the record (which I have been listening to nonstop since Friday) offers a unique way of packaging a film and a record. It is something I have never seen/heard before. But the clever package is not what will stay with me.

Ironically, it’s not even the raw emotion or the beauty of Hansard’s songs or his voice (and that of his costar harmonizing together)

It’s the combination of the filmmaker’s ability to tell this story over one of the songs while the audience gets a flashback of the main character’s relationship with his former girlfriend. We see the pieces of memories and are brought back into room where a lonesome singer with a guitar tries to make sense of it all. That little interlude was as telling and rich and viscous with meaning as the breakup of Charles Foster Kane’s first marriage depicted in a series of breakfast conversations (ending with one last, stoney non-conversation).

In the ex-girlfriend/writing song about ex-girlfriend montage the audience gets real insight into the creative process. You look at the guy going through this stuff again and sending it out through his guitar and with his voice.

Here is where I found the realities of the creative process on display. Nobody is “healed” by writing a song about a painful event, breakup, or whatever. You can give it a different life, sort of, by putting it on a page or in a song or a film. You have come to grips with nothing other than what you have made. You’ve made it, and maybe made something new or tolerable out of it – whatever the “it” was.

That’s what Hansard’s character (probably Hansard himself) gives us and we can see it in this wonderful portion of the film.

He has not made peace with his past. He has made something new from his past.

He is not living in the past; he is just trying to live with it.

See the trailer and then see Once.