“Once” is a tiny Irish picture that made a big splash at the 2007 Sundance Festival by copping the World Cinema Audience Award and is now attracting critical raves and large audiences in very limited release. It’s an extremely simple tale about the relationship that develops between two unlikely people over several days in Dublin: one is a busker, or street musician, and the other a Czech immigrant with a young son and an absent husband. Together they record an album of the guitarist’s songs and then….well, that would spoil the surprise.

Writer-director John Carney, visiting Dallas with the picture’s two stars Glen Hansard (lead singer-songwriter of The Frames) and Marketa Irglova (who’d made an album with Hansard called “The Swell Season”), explained that while the movie remained true to his conception of a musical in which the songs were a part of the story rather than interruptions of it, in other ways it turned out rather differently from the way he’d envisaged.

“I had originally intended to put Cillian [Murphy] in it,” Carney said. “He’s a friend of mine—we’d worked together on a film called ‘On the Edge.’ I’d kind of developed the project with him in mind. Once that jigsaw piece came out of the puzzle, for me it was kind of like, there’s nobody else I want to do this with, in terms of Irish actors. Maybe I should just ask Glen, because he’s come this far and he knows Mar, and it would be really good for him to do a film like this, a musical film. And I like when you see people moonlighting, doing something different, just really surprising you. So I asked him.”

Carney had already tapped Hansard to write the songs for the movie—he’d played bass in The Frames for a few years in the early nineties (“Some songs were written, and some scenes were written, and we kind of exchanged ideas,” he explained)—and it was Hansard who’d suggested Irglova to him for the female lead. “We talked about it,” Hansard said. “In the beginning, when the project was started off, it was going to have a much bigger budget, it was going to have Cillian Murphy playing the part of Busker, and then it all started changing when John cast Mar, because John originally wanted a thirty-five-year old Eastern European woman who was going to come into this guy’s life and wake him up, give him a bit of a slap. John had written the part for an older woman, and then he met Mar.”

Irglova, who was only seventeen at the time, added, “I’ve been playing piano since I was seven, but as far as acting goes, it never even came into my head. I think I got the part mostly because I’m a piano player and a musician.”

Carney admitted as much. “Musicians over actors, yeah,” he said. “It was more important that they could sing, than that they could act.” Hansard noted that the story recalled his own experience of starting out in the business. “I was a busker—for years I was a street musician. That’s what I did,” he said. “And my mother, without telling me, went to the bank and said ‘I want to get the house done up, I want to get new furniture, I want to get new wallpaper, new curtains.’ My mother always had a good relationship with the bank. And she came to me the next day and handed me three grand—‘There you go, son, go make your tape.’ I made a tape out of that money and got signed to a major record label, and my career suddenly jumped up to a whole other level. It was totally due to my mother’s enthusiasm.”

With the casting set, Carney turned back to the script, but he said, “We really didn’t make that many radical changes. The three of us kind of improvised. I did more improvising than anyone. We definitely made things up on the spot and decided this page of dialogue or this scene could be better written by the two actors just talking.” To which Hansard added, “Which we did quite a bit.”

One of the elements of the script that didn’t change was the ending, which will probably come as a surprise to viewers brought up on typical Hollywood fare. Hansard said, “A lot of films let themselves down really badly by wrapping everything up in the last five minutes and giving you a story that trails off lovely. And what happens with those films is that you enjoy them but you forget them, because the story didn’t rip you. But some films pull you in, and then they leave you on edge. They end, and you’re left thinking about it. And that’s really the power of cinema, the duty of cinema—to make you feel something.”

And then in the spirit of “Once,” in which the songs flow naturally from the narrative, Hansard and Irglova agreed to do an impromptu mini-concert for the interviewers, with Hansard accompanying on his worn old guitar as the two sang “Falling Slowly.”

Which reminds me: check out the CD. You won’t be sorry.

B

Ray Lawrence brings a laconic, methodical tone to this film based on a short story by Raymond Carver, about a quartet of men who find a murdered girl’s body while on a fishing trip and are later castigated for not reporting the fact until after finishing their vacation. (The tale earlier served as one of the strands in Robert Altman’s 1993 “Short Cuts,” and it certainly has themes in common with Tim Hunter’s 1986 “River’s Edge.”) The story was originally set in the Pacific Northwest, but here it’s moved to the titular Australian town; and a major new theme is added by the transformation of the dead girl into an Aborigine, whose family and friends impute racial motive to the men’s decision to put their recreation ahead of immediately contacting the authorities.

The geographical change isn’t fatal, but it does inflate the material in an unfortunate way, leading it into the same sort of mystical treatment of an abused minority that Hollywood pictures have so often adopted toward Native Americans (or, at one point in cinematic history, African-Americans). It’s not, of course, that the Aborigines, like Native Americans and blacks, haven’t been oppressed. It’s that the portrayal of their culture is so ostentatiously reverential that it seems more obligatory than authentic, the result more of (understandable) guilt rather than dramatic honesty.

Aside from that, however, there’s much that’s impressive in “Jindabyne.” Like Lawrence’s previous picture, “Lantana,” and more successfully, it’s the rare film that poses moral choices for the audience without reducing them to oversimplification. It also creates a mood of quiet, suppressed tension, not merely in the story of Stewart (Gabriel Byrne), the garage owner who actually finds the dead girl, and his wife Claire (Laura Linney), who becomes the script’s ethical compass, but also in the complementary plot thread involving their little son Tom (Sean Rees-Wemyss) and his troubled school chum Caylin-Calandria (Eva Lazzaro), who play games involving death that—like those in “Jeux interdits”—reflect on the adults’ attitudes. And Lawrence’s treatment, which stages the action in discrete, carefully-staged scenes that ordinarily end in complete fade-outs (courtesy, one presumes, of editor Karl Sodersten), avoids the slightest hit of genre crudity—though, it must be admitted, it lends a certain air of ponderous self-importance to the proceedings, too.

The cast is excellent, with Byrne giving another of his sturdy, intense performances and Linney doing searching work, even if her character’s inner life is only elliptically revealed. There’s also strong support across the board, especially from Deborra-lee Furness as Caylin-Calandria’s adoptive mother, who’d facing her own demons. And from the technical perspective, the film is coolly atmospheric, with David Williamson’s cinematography and the music by Paul Kelly and Dan Luncombe adding to the effect.

And yet that added Aboriginal plot thread feels intrusive, especially since Lawrence and scripter Beatrix Christian make it so integral a part of their work. One might also find the figure of Gregory (Chris Haywood), the elderly electrician with whom “Jindabyne” begins and ends, too opaque and unexplained a character for comfort—especially in terms of the very last shot, which one’s apparently meant to read a good deal into. But ultimately the film’s sensitive treatment of the domestic issues at the center of the story goes far to make up for the more problematic passages.