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"The Swell Season"

Reviewed by Elliot V. Kotek for Paste Magazine 

Directed by: Nick August-Perna, Chris Dapkins, Carlo Mirabella-Davis

Cinematographer: Chris Dapkins

Stars: Glen Hansard, Marketa Irglova, Hansard & Irgl families, Sam Beam

Influenced, no doubt, by the pure ability of the original Sundance hit to strike at the heart strings, audience members will rejoice in the soul-burning effect that "The Swell Season" delivers. Filmed over three years, and mostly post their Oscars glory, the documentary follows Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova on tour, providing backstory to the album and film that made them famous, chronicling their struggles with the concept of fame, and simultaneously bearing (publicly) the intensifying-then-cooling of the embers of their own personal relationship.

With a deft hand that's as much a blessing as a potential point to critique, the documentary delves into this two-some as they come into and out of the camera's eye. While that offers us unique insight into the claustrophobia of their success, which has locked the duo together from the moment their music matched them up and through the requisite touring of an acclaimed album, the closeness with which they're captured distances the audience from the context of the world at large. "The Swell Season" is therefore removed from the happenings of their peers, separated from the news of the world, and bare of commentary from outside the life, love and lyrics of these two musicians in our goldfish bowl and their immediate surrounds.

Ultimately, the doc is as intimate a portrait of a band-slash-couple as any top notch biopic. With apt clarity, the film's three directors celebrate their subjects' story in crisp black & white, automatically rendering the piece as somehow timeless and somewhat classic, a fitting choice with which to tribute the deeply sincere, era-free storytelling nature of this music.