The Swell Season
Cinema Village, October 25, 2011
Movie #76 for 2011
Beginning kind of where the story of 2007's Once (but not the film itself) left off - Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova are lovers and are beautiful, effortless music together as "The Swell Season" and are touring a new album. They’ve just won an Oscar for Best Song for “Falling Slowly” (pictured). Then it all goes downhill.
Hansard is nearly 40 and has been professionally making music - including touring - for more than half his life. Irglova is a shy 19 year-old, has just graduated high school and is playing in massive venues to enormous crowds as much invested in the fairytale of the Hansard/Irglova romance as they are in the music. She is very, very overwhelmed. The fatigue of the road, the reality of success and the disintegration of their relationship are grist, mill-wise.
This is a great documentary: the music is tremendous (although not my usual), it is beautifully shot and the subjects are bare, honest and un-self-conscious with the camera as with each other. Like the 2002 documentary about Wilco, I am Trying to Break Your Heart, the film-makers of The Swell Season (Nick August-Perna, Chris Dapkins and Carlo Mirabella-Davis) were in the right place at the right time to capture unexpected events and deeply interesting conflict. Not just a Once-style love story, it is about struggle, music, fame, ambition, success, failure, intimacy, balance, internal conflict and creativity.
The doco is pieced together from bits and pieces over about three years. And, although it finishes quite abruptly, it tells a cohesive story that - and this is as much as any documentary can ever do - feels true.
