Carney: Begin Again (2013)

Begin Again continues the musical romance of Once, although this time it’s set in New York, and features a wider palette of songs and musical influences. On the face of it, it’s quite a nostalgic film, centring on the relationship between Dan (Mark Ruffalo), a producer who refuses to leave the the CD industry behind, and Gretta (Keira Knightley), a singer-songwriter who refuses to buy into the corporate promotional machine. We meet Gretta in the first few minutes, performing a song that she dedicates to “anyone who’s ever been alone in a big city,” and that sets the scene for the first half of the film, which yearns for a time when New York could offer genuine loneliness, genuine isolation, as opposed to the strange combination of loneliness and connectedness that haunts today’s digitally-saturated metropolis. Total loneliness at least leaves open the possibility of a total reprieve from loneliness – if only in fantasy – and that gravitates the film’s nostalgia towards the musical scenes and sounds of the 60s, all the corners and coffeehouses that served as respites and ports of call for musicians, like Gretta, who arrived from out of town. Among other things, that means that Carney is quite disinterested in any of the indie scenes that have emerged outside of Manhattan in the last decade or so, even though they’re probably the closest New York comes to the kind of small-scene musical community he’s yearning for. Yet just as the film feels like it’s getting too insular, or too white, the nostalgia vanishes, and Gretta and Dan embrace social media, embarking upon an album that they record, in its entirety, on the streets and rooftops of Manhattan, and distribute just as independently, for the price of a single dollar. It’s a striking turn, and feels quite spontaneous, as if Carney had suddenly realised his nostalgia for New York’s singer-songwriter heritage were merely a precursor to a great new golden age of DIY production in which the city itself can become a studio as never before. So if the film starts out with a kind of deliberate unknowing, an almost  unbelievable naivete about the present musical landscape, then it’s only to envisage something more utopian, more inspirational than anything that’s come before, reaching back to a pre-indie mindset only to contemplate what might be genuinely post-indie. And that makes for a post-indie romantic comedy as well, as Carney steers Rob and Gretta in and out of sexual attraction without ever having to really act upon it, let alone fully articulate it, finally diffusing it into a new wave of musical community that’s as collective as it is contagious.