I can’t help but try to nitpick here

Once

This movie is just too perfect for its own good. The characters are real and authentic, the movie barely had any budget (only in the 10^6 range, you know) and one absolutely has to love how the movie was rejected from all those European film festivals and then won the Audience award at Sundance. An Irish guy and a Czech girl. She speaks English with this cute accent and he says “Foack’s sake”. On top of that, the main characters are even a real couple. In real life, the guy has even loved her for over 6 years, from when she was 13 until 19. What a lolicon. So how is it even possible not to love this story?

Let me explain. My first encounter with this movie must be blamed to the Parisian advertising system. The poster of the film was literally everywhere. Every single movie advertised in the French subway system gave me a bad impression, and this one was no exception. I immediately recognized it as one of these “normal life” type movies where the main characters are sympathetic and plain people, losers that are supposed to win everyone’s hearts in a rush. Gah.

By the way, the blog post I have linked in the previous paragraph is really funny. I especially loved the “Things That French People Learned About Dublin Thanks To ‘Once'”. And here I thought both France and Ireland are in the E.U. Then again, no, the one is in the E.U. and the other in the U.E. after all.

It turned out that I actually like the characters, and that I even really like the movie, but another thing bugged me like hell: The budget, the long songs and finally, the horrible actors. Of course this all extremely cute and I can see how people find this authentic unlike most productions about ‘the music scene’. But with such bland and outright incapable actors, I can’t feel any of these ‘authenticities’ myself. These characters don’t even feel in love to me at all, they don’t show any happiness, any anger, any sadness… nothing. All they do is sing, ahem. With better actors who can actually give me the impression that what they are doing is not acting, I can perhaps feel with the characters a little more. And perhaps then I might also be able to feel some connection between them. It’s good to know that both of them don’t seem to want to continue acting.
Next, the story has some pacing issues: I am fine with long songs, after all, I have loved the long opera sequences in “Amadeus” and there are quite a few musicals that I have liked. Also, I can deal with long shots of people simply living (I call this slice of life in a good way). But really, they really could have kept certain scenes shorter.
In general, the direction was the worst I have seen for a long time, especially the cinematography. Heads cut off, awkward angles (what is her head doing in the picture extremely large, looking into the nothing while he’s standing there in the background for no reason?), mindless jumps… I can’t fault them for using a hand camera (that’s really sympathetic and beautifully actually), but I wished they would have made use of this very nice device called tripod a little more often.

The biggest appeal of the story in my opinion actually is the music. The scenes in which they sang seemed unnecessarily long, but just as both of them are horrible as actors, they are actually pretty good musicians. I think that the main song of the film is sweet, and some other songs were even better. They could have provided emotional support to the film easily, too bad the film couldn’t take advantage of this potential. When people like this film, they put an emphasis on how it’s so honest – to me, the honesty was shown nowhere but in the songs they made. In that respect, the performances of their simple, little indie songs is what I probably will remember this film for, in 5 years or so.

Finally, I do think that this movie is something special: Outstandingly brilliant as a movie in its idea and story, but outstandingly bad as a movie in its technical execution. Oh yeah, Markéta Irglová is really cute.