A selective journey through the lives and loves of Irish literary icon Samuel Beckett, Dance First is the first feature in five years from British director James Marsh, best known for his Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire (2008) and the multiple prize-winning Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything (2014). Based on a script by Neil Forsyth, and mostly shot in crisp monochrome, this elusive mosaic portrait is frustratingly light on detail or insight.
That said, Dance First is still a handsome and finely acted affair, with Gabriel Byrne on grand autumnal form as the older Beckett, and veteran French actress Sandrine Bonnaire equally compelling as the mature incarnation of his long-term companion Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil. Backed by the British TV network Sky, it world premieres in San Sebastian Film Festival today as the closing gala screening. A theatrical release is planned for December.
Adapted a line from Waiting for Godot as its title, Dance First is not a straight literary biopic, containing little that Beckett scholars or even casual fans will not already know. Names, timelines and locations are often sketchy. Frustratingly, Forsyth’s screenplay barely touches on Becket’s feted canon of absurdist stage plays, largely because the project was not officially endorsed by his estate. Anyone expecting illuminating insights into the links between art and artist will be disappointed. But as a handsome, intelligent, lightly meta snapshot of Beckett’s eventful private life and tragicomic world-view, Marsh’s film is finely crafted and never dull.
Dance First opens with the older Beckett (Byrne) receiving the Noble Prize for literature in 1969, a traumatic experience for a reclusive writer who disdained fame and deemed himself a failure. But this apparently traditional biopic set-up soon takes a wild detour turn into a surreal realm clearly designed to invoke the author’s unique literary universe. After picking up his prize, an anguished Becket races offstage, climbs into the rafters of the theatre and breaks through into a dreamlike landscape beyond. Here he encounters himself in double form, Byrne handling dual roles with unruffled aplomb. Like Vladimir and Estragon in in Waiting For Godot, this laconic pair exchange mordant quips and deadpan ruminations on Beckett’s life, mostly addressing the shame he feels towards lovers and friends he hurt over the decades.
Dramatising an internal monologue as a two-hander play is an inspired if slightly clunky framing device, allowing Marsh and Forsyth to cherry-pick significant chapters from Beckett’s life. The first concisely distils his fractious relationship with his stern mother Maria (Lisa Dwyer Hogg), who scolds his writing ambitions and squandered talents. Maria is played as a shrill harridan, which feels a little too cartoonish, but arguably a true reflection of young Samuel’s emotionally skewed subjective viewpoint. Irish actor Finn O’Shea is quietly compelling here as the intense, arrogant, but socially awkward young writer.
Next we follow Beckett to Paris, where he pesters fellow Irish literary exile James Joyce into employing him as a secretary and translator. With Aidan Gillen and Bronagh Gallagher giving agreeably puffed-up, flavoursome performances as Joyce and his wife Nora Barnacle, this episode is played as awkward farce, especially after Beckett becomes reluctantly entangled with the pair’s mentally delicate daughter Lucia (Gráinne Good). When he is obliged to end their putative romance, an uneasy mutual admiration between the two writers sours into something more akin to rivalry. In Paris, Beckett also survives a random, near-fatal stabbing by a notorious pimp, and meets his future wife Suzanne (Leonie Lojkine).
During the wartime Nazi occupation of France, Beckett and Suzanne join the French Resistance, fleeing to a small southern town after their group is betrayed and comrades murdered. Despite the constant threat of death, both will later recall these fraught years as their happiest. In the film’s later chapters, Byrne takes over the Beckett role and Bonnaire plays the older Suzanne, their marriage turning bitter as he begins a long affair with English critic and translator Barbara Bray (Maxine Peake). Despite this tortuous love triangle, the couple remain together until her death. Switching to colour for the final chapter, Dance First concludes with Beckett’s own exit from the stage in 1989.
With Budapest standing in for Paris, Dance First has some of the stagey period look and starchy feel of an old-fashioned biopic, but without the comprehensive depth. This is a flatter, smaller, glummer film than a famously dry-witted bon viveur like Beckett deserves. His magnetic appeal to a string of adoring women, for example, looks highly impausible from the sullen, self-absorbed grinch depicted here. A more ambitious film might have tried harder to interrogate his personal charisma, his working methods, his broader cultural impact as a modernist icon, maybe even his enduring influence on later writers like Charlie Kaufman or JM Coetzee.
All the same, Forsyth’s tricksy narrative swerves, Marsh’s brisk directing style, Antonio Paladino’s ravishing monochrome photography and Byrne’s fine-grained hangdog performance all add up to an absorbing overall package. Beckett once described himself as an “interesting failure”, which is too tempting a punchline to use here. Dance First is not perfect, but not a failure either, more like a worthy but flawed attempt to encapsulate an elusive literary giant. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Director: James Marsh (United Kingdom)
Screenwriter: Neil Forsyth
Cast: Gabriel Byrne, Sandrine Bonnaire, Maxine Peake, Fionn O’Shea, Aidan Gillen, Leonie Lojkine, Bronagh Gallagher, Lisa Dwyer Hogg, Barry O’Connor, Robert Aramayo
Producers: Michael Livingstone, Tom Thostrup, Viktória Petrányi, Deborah Aston, Fabian Westerhof
Cinematography: Antonio Paladino
Editing: David Charap
Music: Sarah Bridge
Production companies: 2LE Media (UK), Umedia (Belgium). Proton Cinema (Hungary)
World sales: Film Constellation (UK)
Venue: San Sebastian International Film Festival (official selection, closing gala)
In English
100 minutes