The 1953 novel ‘The Unnamable’ commences with these words – ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on’ that most people including his critics would easily attribute to the Irish born poet, playwright, essayist and novelist, Samuel Beckett. Dance First capture both the abject futility and the pointless stubbornness, for avoiding all ambiguity, of where we place the spirit of the human race in the most understated and emphatic way possible. They carry words of hopelessness and bring hope at the same time. They are, on the other hand, somehow to be found in his bigger body of work.
The inescapable title of this film, ‘Dance First, ‘is derived from his more relating dram, the rather depressive absurd drama ‘Waiting for Godot’ which changed the stage forever. ‘Maybe be can dance first and think afterwards’ is taken from Estragon speaking about Lucky, the servant of the fascist Pozzo. ‘Oppression has clouded Lucky so badly that one does not exactly know how to receive that.
In this fictional biopic directed by James Marsh the puzzles of existence acquire a slightly different and more traditional treatment which does not exactly encourage one to believe that he would do justice to Beckett – consider his bland treatment of Stephen Hawking in the 2014 ‘The Theory of Everything.’
Being a black-and-white film, this movie seems to quite cheerfully indulge in some elements that are explicitly avoided in Beckett’s work, such as a syrupy score (Benoit Viellefon), cutesy, possibly ‘relatable’ protagonists, a sequential structure of episodic tales of romance and heartbreak. Within its largely gray framework, however, the film is still considerably entertaining even if it does not quite sit easily with one’s gut. (But pay attention to this – this particular movie does not have that much reverence to Beckett’s work that it will honor the “Dance first” quote with the proper reference, somewhere towards the end, it is stated something he “said to a student” as if he ‘had’ to do it.)
That is in part because of the work of Gabriel Byrne, who, portraying the old Beckett, manages to project wi . . . Beckett was to bring home the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969, an event he later called ‘a catastrophe.’ He neither attended the ceremony, nor delivered the keynote address that was awaited. It is a backhaired conceit that Marsh’s movie plays out as a Beckett nightmarish fantasy where he goes to the award giving and stands on the top of a ladder outside of the building, in order to avoid the praise.
Byrne’s Beckett finds himself in the bottomless-in-sight gray underground of the theater and (literally in these segments – Byrne is doubled) talks to himself about what he is going to do with that Nobel Prize money.
Trinity College, where he graduated from, can be a good choice. The conversation connects to the people he remembers. His sharp and dominating mother whose pet peeve is that she does not appreciate her daughter’s decision to become a writer. James Joyce’s Lucia who acts as a bridge between Beckett and the member of the family loads herself into who he cares about, her father James (the author you know), Alfred Peron, a friend of his who taught him the language he idiosyncratically later began to write in which is French. (It is hypothesized that the loss of Peron possibly led to the characterization of Lucky in Beckett’s narrative.) And more.
The Dance First movie for the most part, does not bother on the task. With the great number of eventful escapades to summarize Samuel Beckett’s life in it’s self, it does not require any of these elements to be present. There comes a point in time where young Sam (Fionn O’Shea) actually looking shy – imagine! On his person, for instance – are women, some of them played here by Maxine Peake and Sandrine Bonnaire who are in due course attracted to him due to a certain enigmatic self-assuredness that he possesses. He relocates to Paris in 1937 then actively participates in the French Resistance during World War II and shows remarkable bravery and imagination.
When he meets BBC translator Barbara Bray (Peake), he is immediately entranced but maintains his devotion to wife Suzanne (Bonnaire). The older and wiser Beckett of the film has the audacity to ask his double, “What does a snake look like to you?”
The movie skips over a lot in the life: his medical issues (cysts that were chronic and persistent in nature) the fact that he was athletic and … I mean he was a very good cricketer, also the fact that he had a deep affair with the heiress peggy guggenhein, before taking up with Suzanne Dechevaux Dumesnil and so on. And it makes things up: placing him at the Nobel Awards ceremony which in fact was not attended by him except in non-dream sequence when in fact he did not go. It rather seems self evident that what the movie eventually wants from Samuel Beckett is simplicity – if only, Beckett had never ever been – well, Samuel Beckett.
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