“Its deepest romance is not between two lovers, but between people who, for a fleeting moment, make it possible for one another to imagine a life beyond mere survival”

In many ways, John Carney’s Once is a simple film. From its Sundance premiere to winning the Academy Award for Best Original Song with “Falling Slowly” and eventually achieving cult status, it has often been celebrated as a heartfelt musical about two people finding each other through music. An unnamed street musician (Glen Hansard) lives and works with his father in a vacuum repair shop after his mother’s death. By day, he performs covers on the streets of Dublin for loose change; by night, when he no longer has to please passersby for a tip and can finally sing without the demands of the market, he plays his own songs. One day he meets a Czech immigrant (Markéta Irglová), a gifted pianist who sells flowers to support herself, her daughter and mother. Their unlikely friendship becomes the space in which music, briefly, finds the conditions to exist.

At first glance, Once is a platonic love story between two lonely souls searching for connection amid the cold streets of post-Celtic Tiger Dublin. Carney’s intimate, life-as-it-happens filmmaking together with the extraordinary chemistry between Hansard and Irglová, whose real-life relationship inevitably bled into the film’s reception, has long encouraged audiences to ask whether the pair should have ended up together. Yet that question risks flattening what is most remarkable about the film. Its greatest love story is not romantic fulfilment, not because it denies that possibility, but because it refuses to treat it as the story’s ultimate destination. Instead, it locates love in friendship as an act of mutual recognition, beneath which lies a far more profound concern: the near impossibility of making art when one’s life is structured by work, economic precarity, and the quiet shame of being both working class and an artist whose ambitions have been deferred.

Even the film’s marketing encouraged that interpretation. The promotional tagline asked, “How often do you find the right person?“, an invitation to read Once primarily as a romance, while the title itself appears to promise the fairy-tale singularity of such an encounter. Yet Once also invites another reading. How often do we postpone the things that give life meaning, projects, reunions, journeys, artistic ambitions, or simply a moment spent with a friend, until, once, the right conditions finally arrive? Even the fantasy of finding “the right person” depends on material realities: having enough time, enough money, enough stability to imagine a future at all. Love, in Once, is never detached from labour. Rather than escaping the demands of everyday life, it briefly creates a space where people can suspend them long enough to make something beautiful together.

The film captures this tension most clearly when, after days of artistic collaboration and facing the possibility of building a life through music in London, he asks her to come with him. Her response is neither a declaration of love nor refusal, but a simple, practical question: “Can I take my mother with me?” In a single line, Once reminds us that dreams, however sincere, are always negotiated with the material realities that make them possible, or impossible.

Part of what makes Once endure is that it belongs to a historical moment suspended between promises. Released in 2007, on the eve of the global financial crisis, the film captures a Europe in which information, mobility and opportunity seemed abundant, yet the ability to produce meaning, or even imagine a different future, had quietly begun to erode. It is haunted not by what has been lost, but by what never came to pass. Hence, its characters are haunted less by memories than by deferred possibilities. The guy writes songs for a woman who has already left for London, a city close enough to imagine, yet impossibly distant once weighed against the obligation to help his father in the vacuum repair shop and the precariousness of making a living through music. The girl carries with her the memory of her late father, himself a musician who taught her much of what she knows, yet cannot afford a piano of her own, depending instead on the kindness of a shop owner who lets her play one in the store. What haunts Once is not the absence of possibility, but the cruel proximity of lives that remain imaginable, though endlessly pushed away for different reasons.

It can also be said that Carney’s great insight is to reject the neoliberal fantasy that talent and determination are enough. The film understands that art requires material conditions: time, stability and, above all, the presence of others. If there is an act of emancipation in Once, it does not come through individual success or entrepreneurial ambition, but through friendship. The brief collaboration between its protagonists creates a fragile space in which music can exist outside the logic of productivity and exchange. Meaning emerges not from competition, but from cooperation.

It is no coincidence that the film ultimately privileges this bond over romantic fulfilment. In a culture that insists we become self-sufficient, constantly productive and perpetually marketable, friendship becomes a quietly radical act. As seen in the entire process of creating the demo album that might allow him to begin a musical career in London, Once presents artistic creation not as the triumph of an individual talent, but as the result of collective care and sacrifice. He risks his own savings and attempts to secure a bank loan, while she rearranges her already limited time with her daughter to help him record. Even the additional musicians they bring into the project are fellow street performers who already share a sense of community and emotional connection with one another. The album comes into existence not because one person overcomes their circumstances alone, but because a group of people temporarily creates the conditions for each other to dream.

As Franco “Bifo” Berardi argues, in a meaningless world “the condition of the groundless construction of meaning is friendship.” Yet when solidarity dissolves and individuals are left to confront the world in isolation, reality itself begins to lose coherence. Once can be read as a cinematic expression of this idea, for its central insight is that coherence is not something we discover alone, but something we create together. Its deepest romance is not between two lovers, but between people who, for a fleeting moment, make it possible for one another to imagine a life beyond mere survival. And isn’t art itself the greatest proof that life cannot, and perhaps should not, be reduced to survival alone?

“So, if you ever want something, and you call, call, then I’ll come running”
— “When your mind’s made up” (From Once – OST)
To Glen Hansard.
To my friends.