The Great Pretenders

This book focuses on Once (2006), Begin Again (2013), and Sing Street (2013), to date the most successful feature films by John Carney (Dublin, 1972). Drawing mainly on narrative, formalist, and genre theories of film, it presents an in-depth examination of how the formal and stylistic choices by the Irish filmmaker allow each to narrate a story in a certain, coherent way, hide its aural and visual contrivances behind a facade of realism, and engage with universal, national, and personal concerns, with each other, with other Irish and American films, and with mainstream (sub)genres, especially the backstage musical. It also explores the textual articulation of genre in each and the discrepancies between such articulation, the genre expectations set up by the promotional discourse coming from the publicity materials and events accompanying each release, and the genre labelling of each film in contemporary reviews by professional critics from the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Ireland.