John Carney makes musical romances in which playing together gives people a reason to care about one another. We rate him highly when he lets the songs do that work, though the formula invites repetition.
Fi1m perspective
In the piano shop in Once (2007), John Carney lets the first performance of ‘Falling Slowly’ run long enough for us to hear why these two people might want to stay together. Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová have something to do before we are asked to care about their attraction. We were moved by the pleasure of hearing them make something together. The scene earns that feeling by giving us time to listen, without hurrying on to the next development in the romance. That patience is Carney’s strongest quality.
His early features included November Afternoon (1996), co-directed with Tom Hall, and On the Edge (2001), before Once became his international breakthrough. With Begin Again (2014), he moved his musical storytelling to New York and towards the music industry. Sing Street (2016) put a Dublin school band in the 1980s at its centre, while Flora and Son (2023) built its story around a mother, a son and a guitar. These are different circumstances for a familiar interest: people finding something they need through music.
In Once, which he also wrote, the practical business of making music keeps the romance convincing. Hansard’s Dublin busker and Irglová’s Czech immigrant have limited means, and Carney uses that constraint to keep the story from becoming sugary. His collaborators give him a reason to keep watching: the pleasure is in hearing what these particular performers can make together, rather than simply being told that their characters are attracted to one another. The rough photography sometimes makes it harder to concentrate on them. We can forgive it, but it gets in the way of precisely what he does well.
The recurring music-and-romance stories do leave him open to repetition, and a song cannot be expected to make every familiar situation interesting. His next task is to find people as worth listening to as the pair in the piano shop. A return to the same subject would not trouble us if the playing were given that much care. Start with Once, and resist the temptation to talk over the songs.
Biography
John Carney (born 1972) is an Irish film director, screenwriter, producer and composer. He was educated at De La Salle College Churchtown and Synge Street CBS in Dublin. He played bass in the rock band The Frames from 1991 to 1993.
Carney wrote and directed the musical drama Once (2007). His other films as director and writer include On the Edge (2001), Begin Again (2014), Sing Street (2016), Flora and Son (2023) and Power Ballad (2026), on which he is also credited as producer and composer. He co-created the Irish television series Bachelors Walk and served as showrunner and executive producer of the anthology series Modern Love (2019).
