The Swell Season

If you haven't experienced the gorgeous ache of the 2006 film "Once," about a Dublin street musician and the Czech girl he falls in love with, put this paper down and go watch it. Read More

"The Swell Season" closely follows the further fortunes of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, the fairy-tale twosome who won an original-song Academy Award for 2007's hit indie "Once." Tracking the duo on the nationwide concert tour that followed their Oscar triumph, pic captures how their musical partnership proceeds apace, with hotel-room harmonies and backstage orchestrations, even as their romance begins to fade under the stress of the tour and they find themselves reacting very differently to their sudden celebrity. Read More

The struggle to sustain success and stability after years of striving for it proves the focus of The Swell Season , Nick August-Perna, Chris Dapkins, and Carlo Mirabella-Davis's documentary about the two-year concert tour embarked on by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, a.k.a. the Swell Season, in the wake of their Best Song Oscar for Once. Embossed in silken black and white, the film is, at heart, a snapshot of "what happens next" for the twosome, who come to this newfound fame and popularity via very different paths, with the fortysomething Glen having toiled as a musician since ditching school at 14, and the twentysomething Marketa having found stardom almost immediately upon teaming with Glen. The filmmakers, however, dispense with all but fleeting context, a strange approach thatas with mentions of Glen's prior band the Frames, or Marketa's young agewrongly assumes its audience's familiarity with the duo's Wikipedia bios, if not the intimate details of their professional and personal lives. Read More