SING STREET
The director of Once does it again with his latest feelgooder.
Sometimes a story comes out of nowhere, and sometimes you have to live it first. That’s essentially what happened with Sing Street, the third film from Once director John Carney.
An ’80s-set Irish musical that’s both a coming-of-ager and a bona fide foot-stomper, it follows 15-year-old schoolboy Cosmo (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) as he forms a band to impress his crush, enigmatic older girl Raphina (Lucy Boynton). It’s also set at the same Synge Street School Carney attended in Dublin as a child – he even went back there to make the film.
“It was amazing going back to all those scenes of so many little disasters and personal catastrophes, then actually having the triumph of making a film,” he tells Buzz. “If I’d thought of it as a kid, if somebody had said, ‘You’ll be back here shooting a film in this very spot,’ I kind of wouldn’t have believed it. When you’re actually doing it, you go, ‘It’s just a building.’ All the ghosts are gone.”
Not that the film’s entirely autobiographical. “It’s more like a scrappy, slightly faded diary of the period,” Carney says, adding that the real inspiration for Sing Street came when, shortly after making Once, he was sitting on a train and spotted a schoolboy carrying a guitar: “I remember the juxtaposition of the school uniform and the bass. Those two things looking slightly incongruous together.”
Forming his own band and composing “eight or nine” original songs for the film, Carney succeeds in making Sing Street every bit as emotionally affecting as Once – though his motivation isn’t plucking heart strings. “I’m not a very emotional person,” he admits. “It’s a strange one, people felt the same way about Once. The films I make are more emotional than I am as a person...” JW
ET A | 22 April Sing Street opens next month.