The Greatest Hits: A most unusual love story

The Greatest Hits (2024) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for drug use, sexual candor and fleeting profanity

Available via: Hulu

By Derrick Bang

Writer/director Ned Benson’s beguiling little charmer expands upon a premise that’ll feel familiar to everybody: the power of a beloved song to take us back in time to where we were, and who with, the first time it was heard.

 

After a couple of chance encounters, sparks fly when Harriet (Lucy Boynton) and David
(Justin H. Min) playfully argue over who gets to purchase a rare, one-of-a-kind LP in
her favorite music store.

But in the case of Harriet (Lucy Boynton), the result isn’t merely a memory; she literally re-lives the few minutes when she first heard the tune with beloved boyfriend Max (David Corenswet).

This isn’t a happy ability. 

 

As revealed when this story begins — after Harriet, alone in her apartment, cues up The The’s aptly titled “This Is the Day,” on her fancy turntable — that tune was playing when she and Max were involved in a car accident. He died; she wound up in a coma for a week.

 

Upon wakening, she discovered — to her horror — that every tune she and Max ever heard, during their four years together, yanks her back to that particular moment of their relationship. Her past self’s awareness of this doesn’t help; we realize, from Harriet’s forlorn bearing, that she has tried many, many times to prevent the accident. And failed.

 

Two years have passed, during which Harriet has — as a means of self-preservation — cocooned herself into an isolated life. She has forsaken a once-budding career in music production, to work in the silence of a library. When not there, or at home, she wears noise-canceling headphones, in order to prevent accidentally overhearing a “trigger” song; if that happens, her present-day self goes into an unconscious trance ... which, obviously, could be dangerous.

 

Over time, she has catalogued scores of trigger songs that allow her, in the privacy of her apartment, to re-live happier moments with Max. But this is unhealthy, as it prevents her from processing grief; indeed, such sessions simply fuel her misery. Her only companion is the devoted little dog she “inherited” after the accident.

 

She always sits in an antique armchair, facing her system speakers, in a pose that cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung cheekily lifts from Maxell’s iconic 1980s “Blown-Away Guy” ads for audiocassettes. (I have to wonder how many of this film’s viewers will recognize the reference.)

 

Jamie XX’s “Loud Places” sends her back to the music festival when she and Max first met. Yellow Days’ “Gap in the Clouds” finds them during a romantic moment on an isolated beach. And so forth. (Benson’s film is wall-to-wall music; every song is carefully selected to add impact or irony to a given scene.)

 

It’s like a drug, and Harriet is hooked: “It’s so easy to be pulled back into the past.”

Sing Street: A joyful noise

Sing Street (2016) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic candor, profanity, underage smoking and other questionable teen behavior
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.29.16

I’m in love.

Much the way the young star of this indie charmer worships the mysterious girl who lives across the street from his school, I adore the filmmaking chops of Irish writer/director John Carney.

Having worked up the courage to chat up the intriguing girl (Lucy Boynton) who often
stands across the street from his school, Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) concocts an
improbable scheme to get her attention. The problem, then, is making good on his
grandiose claims...

He came to our attention Stateside with 2007’s endearing Once, and its music-laden saga of a Dublin busker and Czech immigrant who meet and then bond over their shared love of songwriting and performing. Stars Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová fell in love during production, and it showed; nothing could have been sweeter than their Academy Awards performance of the film’s signature tune, “Falling Slowly,” which deservedly galloped home with an Oscar.

Carney detoured with a couple of less successful projects before returning to the music world with 2013’s equally appealing Begin Again, which found washed up, Manhattan-based music exec Mark Ruffalo embracing one last career shot by encouraging the efforts of fledgling singer/songwriter Keira Knightley. As with Once, the action unfolds against a backdrop of catchy, radio-ready new songs: another instant soundtrack hit for delighted fans.

Pleasant as it was, though, a certain something was missing from Begin Again: something that has become obvious with the arrival of Sing Street. As a writer, Carney clearly has the most fun exploring his Irish roots; this new film’s hard-scrabble, working-class Dublin setting affords a rich tapestry of young angst and earthy ensemble dynamics.

Carney sets his story in the 1980s, as a bleak employment depression sends ferryloads of young Irish citizens to London, in the (often vain) hope of landing a steady paycheck. Against this backdrop, 15-year-old Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) finds life at home increasingly distressing. Parents Robert (Aidan Gillen) and Penny (Maria Doyle Kennedy) are heading for a messy divorce, heedless of the impact the process is having on Conor, his sister Ann (Kelly Thornton) and their older brother Brendan (Jack Reynor).

Financial stress contributes to the trauma, and one immediate change affects Conor personally. To save money, he’s moved from his posh Jesuit private school to an inner-city comprehensive: Synge Street School, laden with cigarette-smoking bullies barely kept under control by mostly ineffectual priests. The one exception is the smugly authoritarian Brother Baxter (Don Wycherley), a tyrannical monster who takes pleasure in humiliating his students.

Barely into his first day, Conor runs afoul of both Brother Baxter and the hulking Barry (Ian Kenny), a vicious older student likely passed from one grade to the next, just so his previous instructors can get rid of him.