‘Dance First’: San Sebastian Review

Dir. James Marsh. UK/Hungary/Belgium. 2023. 100 mins. 

You would naturally expect a film about Samuel Beckett to be on the lugubrious side. What’s surprising about quasi-biopic Dance First is that it is quite so lyrically lugubrious. Revolving around Gabriel Byrne’s engagingly dry performance – or performances plural – the film, directed by James Marsh and scripted by Neil Forsyth, offers a series of vignettes from the writer’s life, from childhood to old age, interspersed with dialogues between Beckett and himself.

A softer, more romantic proposition than its subject might seem to merit

The formal premise is ingenious but it’s questionable how much insight we get into Beckett as man or as artist, given a certain preciousness in the execution. Whether or not hardcore Beckett followers will regard Dance First as a heretical demystification of a lofty literary deity, Dance First is marred by a stylistic softness, even at times coyness, that doesn’t entirely serve its subject. The film is likely to elicit ripples of specialist interest following its San Sebastian closing night premiere (billed as a Sky Original and distributed in Spain by Filmin, it is scheduled for UK theatrical release in early November), but overall is unlikely to draw Nobel-level attention.

The title comes from the phrase, “Dance first, think later” – here presented as an ethos of Beckett’s, although it is in fact a quotation from ’Godot’, taken out of its ironic context.  Largely shot in black and white, the film begins in Stockholm in 1969, at the ceremony where a formally-suited Beckett (Byrne) is to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Seated beside his wife Suzanne (Sandrine Bonnaire), he mutters, “What a catastrophe,” (an opinion in reality attributed to her), then strides to the stage.

Instead of giving an address, he climbs a ladder to a vast cavernous space and engages in conversation with himself – a more casually dressed Byrne, in the writer’s familiar tweed jacket and turtleneck. Beckett the Nobel laureate muses on giving away the prize money by way of atonement to someone he has wronged in his life – but who? “You know this is going to be a journey through your shame,” says turtlenecked Beckett.

The subsequent episodes trace the origins of Beckett’s guilt, and sometimes resentment, towards figures in his life, beginning with his mother. The boy Samuel is first seen in rural Ireland jubilantly flying a kite with his father – an episode set up, somewhat knowingly, as a symbolic ‘Rosebud’ moment. A little older, he argues defiantly with his coldly disapproving mother May (Lisa Dwyer Hogg) over his delivery of a Yeats poem. Years later, May reacts contemptuously to her son’s first published work – leading earnest young adult Samuel (Fionn O’Shea) to flee, remembering his father’s dying advice, “Fight. Fight. Fight.”

Beckett arrives in 1920s Paris – the city represented throughout, not entirely convincingly, by assorted Budapest locations. He procures a secretarial post with his hero James Joyce (Aidan Gillen, nicely impish), affording some elliptical exchanges between the old master and the ascending tyro that, in Forsyth’s dialogue, carry a genuine ring of the their distinctive cadences. However, Beckett soon finds Joyce and wife Nora (a sharply comic Bronagh Gallagher) insisting that he escort their daughter Lucia to dances. It emerges that Lucia (played at full tilt by Gráinne Good as a kind of Manic Pixie Flapper) is mentally disturbed; her surprise announcement that she and the solemn young Samuel are engaged causes him to leave the household.

The next episode is devoted both to Beckett’s fellow Joyce translator Alfred Péron (Robert Aramayo) and to Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil (played in her youth by Léonie Lojkine), a young woman who tends and romances Samuel after he is stabbed by a pimp. As the Germans occupy Paris, Beckett follows Péron into the French Resistance, and lives an austere rural existence with Suzanne – whose happiness in such hard times the pathologically severe Samuel is at a loss to comprehend.

Later, as literary celebrity looms, thanks to the success of his play ’Waiting For Godot’, Beckett (with Byrne taking over from O’Shea)  begins a professional and amorous liaison with BBC executive, translator and critic Barbara Bray (a grandly silky Maxine Peake). Her presence in his life increasingly fuels Beckett’s tensions with Suzanne - as shown in the final episode, shot in faded colour, which shows the elderly couple in their stark Paris apartment, a melancholic sequence that seems to tip its hat stylistically and thematically to Michael Haneke’s Amour.

The film is at its strongest when Byrne – either solo or artfully composited into dialogues with himself – is at centre stage. Giving a rueful but often tartly humorous evocation of Beckett as a vulnerable, tender figure, he convincingly humanises a writer often represented as an inaccessibly lofty secular prophet. Byrne brings Beckett the man into accessible focus, rather more convincingly than O’Shea’s younger Sam, who consistently seems so doleful that you wonder why first Lucia, then Suzanne feel such joy in his company. (“There’s nothing interesting about joy,” the older Beckett remarks.)

There’s definitely a Beckettian ring to some of the dialogue spun by Forsyth, admired for his TV work, most recently The Gold and Guilt. And the film does make a point of skirting some obvious aspects of Beckett’s rise to celebrity, casting a spotlight on aspects of his life that will be less familiar, to non-acolytes at least: notably, his Resistance activity and friendship with Péron. What we don’t get much sense of, beyond Beckett’s occasional maxim-like pronouncements, is a sense of the writer, the sources of his inspiration and development: it’s hard to connect this film’s bewildered, ever-frowning young Sam with the scabrous, playful tenor of his early works. Of the oeuvre itself, ’Godot’ is sparingly alluded to (Bray is seen marvelling over a copy: “Nothing happens… It’s a masterpiece”), and we witness a moment from a performance of ’Play’ (1963), whose three characters trapped in urns seem to represent the Beckett-Bray love triangle.

Language itself is something of a problem in the film, with Beckett, old and young, conversing in English with the two heavily-accented French performers who play Suzanne. Sandrine Bonnaire is nothing if not a formidable performer, and her increasingly wracked Suzanne exudes undeniably imposing intensity – yet there’s an awkwardness about many of her English line readings that doesn’t gel with Byrne’s lighter delivery.

Visually, the film displays a poetically atmospheric tone, of a sort that director Marsh (Man On Wire, The Theory of Everything, 2018 true-heist drama King Of Thieves) hasn’t opted for since his gorgeously stylised 1999 Wisconsin Death Trip. Cinematographer Antonio Paladino brings poetry to his use of feathery light and fine-grained chiaroscuro; but the overall effect is a sometimes overpowering aesthetic lyricism, and you miss a certain harsher edge, or even mundanity, that might make the film more authentically Beckett-like. A sometimes over-twinkly soundtrack makes Dance First a softer, more romantic proposition than its subject might seem to merit, and may ultimately leave those unfamiliar with the master wondering just what his problem was, the frightful old Human Condition notwithstanding.