Academic Journal 14 - Once Ending (Twice Shy)

I really enjoyed ‘Once;’ in fact, I went out and bought the soundtrack/score from Amazon.com as soon as I got home from Ireland. The timing to watch it was right, as we recognized many of the areas of Dublin where filming occurred, which I think helped us to identify with and relate to the film in a different way than we would have at the beginning of the trip. One thing that really stuck with me about the film was the ending. I was pretty sure that I had the ending predicted early on; their awkwardness would melt away as they worked together, leading to a stolen kiss, a lingering embrace, and at long last they would “find” each other. Even signals that seemed to belie this expectation fed my belief – he called his ex girlfriend and said he was coming to find her, but of course at the last minute he would have a change of heart. After standing him up, the Girl would catch him at the airport, or fly to London to find him. When he left the airport towards the end, I just knew he was running to her arms, and when the piano arrived, I just knew she would be on the next plane.
But it didn’t happen, which some of my classmates disliked. They felt that these two characters had been built up as a romantic couple over the course of the film, and were somehow robbed of that by the end. I disagreed, but at the same time I see their reasoning, and expect that many people (at least, Americans) might feel the same way. It’s a difficult ending in many ways. It isn’t a tragic ending, where they secretly pine for each other as they stumble through the lives they chose. It’s a happy ending in that he is off to pursue a career and she has her husband with her, but it’s not happy in the sense of the Boy and Girl ending up together. Why did the writer and director choose to end the film this way, with him leaving to be with his ex and yet buying the Girl a piano even after she stood him up the night before?
I don’t know for sure, but I have a theory: the romantic plot is there to serve the main plot of musicians coming into their own talent, rather than the other way around. I assumed from the start that this was the story of two people who fall in love, and that the musical subplot was a vehicle to tell the story of their relationship; that’s the way many romance films seem to be structure – whatever the main characters do is just a part of how they get together, which serves the story of a budding romance. But the screenwriter didn’t want to tell a love story, s/he wanted to tell a music story. How do we get these two musicians to work together? He’s broken hearted, and she’s a lonely foreigner. Hey, a romantic interest between them! I think that might be what threw off my classmates – like me, they expected a love story carried by a musical arc. But I love films that feel different, and ‘Once’ was surely that.