Filmmaker and screenwriter John Carney once told us about the reconciling, world-enchanting power of music. 2006 in “Once”, this bittersweet surprise success, it was a Dublin street musician and a young Eastern European immigrant who were ablePosted by Barnes Cain on January 14th, 2021 It was black days and weeks for songwriter and singer Gretta (Keira Knightley) from England. There is nothing left of the hopes and dreams that came true when they arrived in New York. While her long-time friend Dave (Adam Levine) tours across the United States and enjoys his new life as a rock star, she wanders alone and deserted through Manhattan. But now it should be over. It's her last night in New York. And maybe that's why she lets a good friend persuade her to sing one of her songs in a small club. 123movie and label founder Dan (Mark Ruffalo) has also been in a deep crisis for a long time. Now, of all days, he lost his job and drifts aimlessly through the nightly streets of New York from one drink to another. In the end, he ends up in the very club where Gretta appears rather reluctantly. As in “Once”, John Carney also plays in “Can a Song Save Your Life?” With a thoroughly romantic cliché. Gretta and Dan are meant for each other, not necessarily as lovers, though Carney at least suggests that possibility too. But even in this way only they can redeem each other. The song, which Gretta sings in a strange passive-aggressive way in the small club, even saves two lives. On that first night Dan had a great idea. Together with Gretta he wants to record an album in public places, under bridges and on high-rise roofs, in side streets and on the lake in Central Park. A crazy and precisely because of that so delightful idea. Life in the streets and houses just goes on during the recordings. It becomes the constantly present background of the songs, which don't even try to compete with the sounds of the city. Like Gretta and Dan, John Carney dreams of reconciling art and life, reality and fairy tales, at least for a few moments. In the sessions scattered all over Manhattan, which function almost like classic musical sequences and could also stand on their own as New York snapshots, Carney even succeeds. These scenes have an almost magical effect. In them, the places and the music seem enchanted. Dan once gave money to a couple of children who were playing in a side street. So that they don't disturb the recording, he integrates them into the song. That is of course pure kitsch. But Carney manages to give even such moments a disarming poetry.
Hollywood romance and indie yearnings, real life and fairytale entanglements, a star from blockbusters and art house films and a character actor who defies any form of glamor, actually none of these should go together at all. Nevertheless, the mixture somehow works out in the end, and Carney owes that to his two main actors.
Keira Knightley ("Pirates of the Caribbean") and Mark Ruffalo ("The Avengers") achieve the almost impossible. Although their characters, with all of their generic problems and the soap opera entanglements they get caught up in, are pure constructs, Gretta and Dan seem absolutely natural. Ruffalo just has to play out his charm, with which he can ultimately turn every loser and every grumbler into an enchanting outsider. But Keira Knightley actually surprises in the role of the betrayed woman who was actually always in the shadow of her lover. Vulnerability and strength are miraculously balanced in their game.
Conclusion: In principle, of course, John Carney is exaggerating. On the one hand, he plays exactly according to the rules of romantic cinema, which wants to take its audience into a kind of fairytale world. On the other hand, he rebels against the market
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