Using the trivial to express the sublime

Dillan 2022-04-24 07:01:08

Once I saw this quote by Jean-François Millet at an art exhibition:
"One must be able to use the trivial to express the sublime-that is true power!"

This is exactly what this film has done, to delineate the most delicate and beautiful with what appears most trivial. It reminds people that you don't need a half billion dollar budget, and a script that tells you a grandiose love story, family feud, end of age disaster, or anything so dramatic yet so hallow, to make it a great film that touches one's heart.

Life ain't easy, he's impoverished and hopeless except for his music; she's a young single immigrant mother without an education. And when they were both stroking hard in the tides of life they encounter, and inevitably falls for each other. The way she drags her old-fashioned broken vacuum across the somewhat-sullen streets of Dublin was so damn cute indeed. She's from Czech, perhaps from Prague, the town of exquisite fragility, of a once-artistic stage for rusting pedrails and clicking cartridge boxes.

Music is the medium of expression, of communication with a power beyond that of language.

The night she's done all the chores, she picks up his CD player; it's out of power, so she runs down the dilapidated residency streets to get her battery.
Then she walks and turns and turns, singing and chanting, on and on, trying to seize the moment as if it'd be gone soon, yet she'd be remembering it, coz she'd know in the future that, she had it, for Once.

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Extended Reading

Once quotes

  • [first lines]

    Heroin Addict: Fuckin' deadly you are, man.

    Guy: Don't fucking... don't fucking go near that case.

    Heroin Addict: What? I'm just tying me laces, man.

  • [repeated line]

    Guy: For fuck's sake...