For such a modest movie, John Carney’s Once sure does have big ideas. This film, which dangles precariously between rom-com and musical and chronicles a slightly tragic love story with songwriter accompaniment, Carney has called a “visual album”. Winner of the Audience Award at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and the 2008 Oscar for Best Song - Falling Slowly, Once already has a built-in audience with Glen Hansard, the lead singer of Dublin-based rockers The Frames, who got his start, musically and cinematically, in Alan Parker’s The Commitments.

Unlike Tommy or The Wall, the cinematic repercussions of Hansard’s songs in this film were never foretold in any of The Frames’ albums; all the songs were written during Carney’s screenwriting process. Carney believes that three-minute pop songs can weigh equally with 10 pages of dialogue and uses many of Hansard and his co-star Markétá Irglová’s songs to relate emotional weight, an easy way out for exposition. Yet, the exposition is still there, though the songs are melodramatic enough, and Carney’s idea is still sound.

Hansard and Irglová meet one night as he shrieks out some Coldplay knock-off and she sells flowers on her way home to see her mother and child. She asks why he doesn’t sing his songs during the daytime; he replies that the public just wants popular songs. Soon, he is repairing her vacuum as he gives her songs he has written about his ex-girlfriend, hoping she can flesh them out. Their romance, initially botched by his awkward offer to bed her, simmers under a dull flame as they start recruiting band members to help with a weekend studio session before he heads back to London and she reunites with her estranged husband. Shocker: the producer on their sessions falls in love with the songs and thinks they have a real chance of selling.

The trajectory is just that: Hansard and Irglová’s songs will sell like a hijacked box of iPhones and the pair will meet again. The against-all-odds attitude this otherwise charming experiment gives off couldn’t be more bogus if James Blunt sat on a stage in front of an empty bar saying, “This one’s for the lady in the back.” Far be it for me to bemoan any film that pokes at the struggles of an up-and-coming singer/songwriter, but we’re not talking about Nick Drake or Jeff Buckley here. We’re talking Chris Martin with a caterwauling howl instead of a lilting coo.

What sticks and ultimately makes the film memorable is the subtle ebb-and-flow of the relationship and the unlikely capturing of songwriting in action. The 35mm work keeps a shy eye towards the pair with only a couple of rather odd but effective crane shots used to punctuate the action. Hansard and Irglová, non-actors for the most part, are appealingly natural and are mesmerizing in the throes of song. Effectively, Carney’s idea realizes an interesting and believable scenario but imagines it at the whim of lukewarm music-business politics. Unlike its music, Once seems smitten with the scent of discovery and uses it to further invigorate a tired trick.

Chris Cabin