Irish Tango
- An Analysis of the Irish Movie "Once"
Love to me is not a skin-to-skin relationship, it is not a meal, it is the desire to live and die, and it is a heroic dream in a tired life.
_Margaret Duras
has always liked this sentence of Margaret Duras. Generally speaking, they think it is about love, but it is not. Just like "once", we always think it is about love It's also telling an ordinary love story. In fact, it's not like this. If you have a soul mate in your life, maybe you will miss him gently after watching "Once".
"Once" is the representative and famous work of Irish director John Carney. The film tells the story of two young people with musical dreams. The film has won praise for its fresh and elegant style and original classic music, which fully reflects the Ireland's excellent cultural heritage as the temple of modern music. It is also a representative work of Irish cinema.
The hero and heroine in the film are people living at the bottom of the society. The hero is a singer from Tianqiao, who makes a living by working for his father's vacuum cleaner shop during the day. The heroine is a single mother who immigrated from the Czech Republic. She makes a living by doing odd jobs. In the evening, the heroine stopped in front of the hero and listened to him sing. She felt that his songs had rich stories, so she chatted with him and got acquainted with him, and made an appointment to meet the next day. The boy would help her repair the broken Hoover machine. On the second day, again by accident, he found out that she also likes music and can play the piano, so everything went down, there were many, many accidental final formations, they listened to songs together, encouraged each other, and even later formed a group. The band went to record the boy's song, and the two had the same goal, and they had a very tacit understanding in music. They were also very happy together, but they didn't develop into love, because they couldn't get over the past years and forget their former lover. In the end, the boy went to London to find his lover, and she also waited for her husband. It's such a simple and even boring story, a bit similar to a covered bridge's last dream, but it's about something completely different. However, they are all narrations of the best moments of life. What it condenses is the beauty that we cannot enjoy in a lifetime!
Film tone and directing style
This movie often reminds me of Irish folk songs I heard a long time ago, with pure and clean voice and unpretentious lyrics. "Once" is a movie that gives people this feeling. Director John Carney may not be directing However, he is using the most real feelings of music and life to record a life state. Because both the director and the male lead in the film are the singers of the band the frame, and the female lead is also the lead singer of a certain band, so the highlight of this film, apart from the music, is this natural, unskilled expression of craftsmanship. It starts with a long shot that is not very fixed. There are also many shots similar to family photography in the middle, and many unstable shots, all of which reveal a natural postmodern casual atmosphere, with a strong naturalistic temperament, although some people It is said that this is an imitation of the movies "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset", but this still does not prevent everyone from pursuing and loving it. At the same time, the long shot brings emotional extension and coherence, making the performance of the film more realistic and natural.
For a film with music as the main line, the internal composition and use of the lens should be very particular. In this film, the director abandoned this concept. When the heroine wrote the lyrics "if you want me" in the film, the director was completely on-site. The real recording, all the characters around and the environment maintain their authenticity, a sports field shot, and the magnetic voice completely take the audience out of the film and into another poetic and beautiful realm.
At the same time, as a reflection and description of people living at the bottom of society, the director maintains a parallel perspective instead of expressing it in an attitude of pity or sympathy. There is also no self-pity in the whole film, which is an angle that many directors who now profess to care about the bottom of the society cannot achieve.
Musical performance:
The music is the main line to connect the structure, the plot and the music stimulate each other, and the music is used as a natural transition between paragraphs. This is one of the reasons why this film is so smooth, because the music has a narrative or emotional connection. , in this way, it can well integrate the scattered information in the film together. so as to achieve overall integrity.
video theme
The theme of the film is divided into several levels. First of all, it should reflect the loneliness of modern people, whether in spirit or in life, maybe everyone has felt this way. On the spiritual level, our belief is loneliness. Yes, dreams are lonely. In our life, we need too much recognition, but we always get too little feedback, especially when what you think is no longer what ordinary people think, and is no longer what the current state of life is. Allow it, and your loneliness will become loneliness sealed in your bones. In the film, before the two met, he just sang on the flyover alone, and she just went to the piano shop to play the piano every day. They were all alone in love with one thing until they met and their music met. The piano and guitar ensemble together to produce the notes. The fit is warm and comforting.
On the second level, everyone is responsible for their own dreams.
It seems that all people who like music and art have ambitions, and when this ambition expands, they have dreams. In "once", both of them have their own dreams. The hero's dream is at the forefront, pure and simple. Simple, and the dreams of Czech girls are repressed and life-limited. Because of music, they have become close friends in the soul. Music makes life detached, away from the body, the heaviness of the world, and the track of time and space. It has become their heroic dream in a tired life. . Although they are not people who let music be carried forward together with their names, but they are not humble, they are working hard and struggling in their lives. Impressive too. This is something that many modern people cannot insist on. We often let life put our dreams on the shelf, and the characters in the film are obsessed with music dreams, even paranoid. Maybe we should be able to calm down, drink a cup of tea, and think back to those dreams.
Regarding the title "once",
I think the reason why the title is "once", translated as "Once Owned", is another hidden meaning of this film, yes, many things can only be owned once, like "Covered Bridge" "Last Dreams", if the friendship at this moment is scattered in such a complicated life, it will surely taste the same, and it will be boring. If life is just like the first sight, they may have done it. If the bosom friend is in the end of the world, wouldn't it be better than in the near future?
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