The Great Pretenders

This book focuses on the most successful feature films of John Carney, namely Once (2006), Begin Again (2013) and Sing Street (2016). Drawing on narrative, formalist and genre theories of film, the book presents an in-depth examination of how the formal and stylistic choices made by Carney allow each film to narrate a story in a coherent way. It shows how aural and visual contrivances are hidden behind a façade of realism, and how the films engage with universal, national and personal concerns and also how they relate to each other and to Irish and American film in general. 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.