August 24, 2024
by Carla Hay
Directed by James Marsh
Some language in French and Irish with subtitles
Culture Representation: Taking place in Ireland, France and briefly in Norway, from 1911 to 1989, the dramatic film “Dance First” (a biopic of writer Samuel Beckett) features an all-white group of people representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: Samuel Beckett leaves his native Ireland to live in France as a writer, and he becomes entangled in the French Resistance against Nazis and personal problems in his love relationships.
Culture Audience: “Dance First” will appeal mainly to people who are fans of Beckett and the movie’s headliners, but the movie leaves out a lot of information about the work that made Beckett famous.
“Dance First” (a biopic of writer Samuel Beckett) crafts his life story like a stylish but uneven patchwork quilt. The cast members’ performances can keep viewers interested when some scenes drag with monotony. The movie mostly ignores his creative talent.
Directed by James Marsh and written by Neil Forsyth, “Dance First” gets its title from this quote attributed to Beckett: “Dance first, think later.” Beckett (who was born in Foxrock, Ireland, in 1906, and died in Paris in 1989) was best known for his plays “Waiting for Godot” and “Endgame,” but he also wrote novels, poems and short stories. Beckett also worked as a theater director.
“Dance First” (which was filmed in black and white) had its world premiere at the 2023 San Sebastian International Film Festival. In the production notes for “Dance First,” director Marsh has this description of the movie: “It’s an unusual biography of Samuel Beckett, unusual because it reviews his life through the lens of his mistakes.” The movie’s synopsis reads, in part: “Literary genius Samuel Beckett lived a life of many parts: Parisian bon vivant, WWII Resistance fighter, Nobel Prize-winning playwright, philandering husband, recluse. But despite all the adulation that came his, way he was a man acutely aware of his own failings.”
The problem is that by focusing mostly on Beckett’s failings and mistakes, “Dance First” comes across as an incomplete picture that ultimately does not do justice to Beckett as a well-rounded and complex person. The movie goes out its way to sideline meaningful insights to Beckett as an artist, which is the aspect of his life that has the most public interest. Instead, “Dance First” is a series of scenes showing how his relationships mostly made him feel sad or restless.
“Dance First” is divided into five chapters, with all but one named after a pivotal person in his life. For the purposes of this review, the real people will be referred to by their last names. The characters in “Dance First” will be referred to by their first names.
“Dance First” opens with a scene taking place in 1969, when 63-year-old Samuel (played by Gabriel Byrne) is in Oslo, Norway, to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. (“Dance First” was actually filmed in Belgium.) Sitting next to Samuel at the ceremony is his wife Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil (played by Sandrine Bonnaire), a French pianist who married him in 1961. As Samuel is being praised on stage, he looks disgusted and mutters to Suzanne, “What a catastrophe.”
Samuel angrily strides on stage to accept the prize, which he grabs as if it’s a worthless trinket. He then quickly walks out of the venue, climbs up on a water tower, and finds himself in a desert-like area where he sees a man (also played by Byrne), who looks just like him. That’s because the other man is also Samuel, who is seen talking to himself in interlude scenes for the rest of the movie, which shows him from the ages of 5 to the last year of his life at age 83.
It’s always a risk when a movie wants to be a serious dramatic biopic but then introduces fantasy elements that have a main character talking to a physical embodiment of himself. This risk doesn’t quite pay off in “Dance First,” because it comes across as a gimmicky distraction. The two Samuels often argue with each other, which is the movie’s way of showing that Samuel has inner conflicts.
The “real” Samuel is stubborn and cranky in old age, while “alter ego” Samuel is somehow wise enough to know what the future holds and gives the “real” Samuel advice that the “real” Samuel doesn’t necessarily want to hear. The entire movie has an off-kilter tone of making the “real” Samuel look back on his life, with the “alter ego” Samuel trying to make him feel shame and regret for his mistakes.
The “real” Samuel tells “alter ego” Samuel that he doesn’t deserve this Nobel Prize, so he wants to give the prize money to charity. The “real” Samuel then starts to have memories of people from his past, as a way to determine whom he should contact to possibly donate the money. It’s supposed to give Samuel’s reminiscing an extra layer of gravitas, but it just further muddles the story.
“Dance First” then takes a detour into a chapter called “Mother,” because Samuel says “it all starts with mother.” This chapter of the movie begins by showing Samuel’s childhood at age 5 (played by Cillian Hollywood) and age 10 (played by Caleb Johnston-Miller), when he was raised by two very different parents. Samuel’s mother May Beckett (played by Lisa Dwyer Hogg) is domineering and overly critical. (In real life, Samuel Beckett’s mother’s first name was Maria, and she worked as a nurse.) May constantly corrects Samuel on how he pronounces and writes words.
Samuel’s father William Beckett (played by Barry O’Connor), who is barely in the movie, is kind and loving. In real life, William Beckett was a quantity surveyor. There are some brief scenes of William doing things such as walking with boyhood Samuel in a field, but the character of William remains a mostly passive presence who does nothing to stop May’s psychological torment of Samuel. In real life, Samuel Beckett had a brother named Frank, who was four years older that Samuel, but Frank is erased from this movie’s story.
Predictably, the negative parental experiences have more of an impact on Samuel. As a teenager and young adult, Samuel (played by Fionn O’Shea) and May continue to clash with each other. By now, Samuel has become an aspiring writer, but his mother seems to relish in humiliating him with cruel critiques. In one of the movie’s more dramatic scenes, May thinks that something Samuel wrote is an unflattering depiction of her.
“You’re demonizing me!” May yells at him. Samuel replies, “You only imagine it is you because the whole world is you.” It’s implied by not said aloud that May is a narcissist who might have a mental illness or personality disorder. Samuel’s love/hate relationship with his mother and his need for her approval will play out in different ways with other women in his life, particularly the woman would become his wife.
In other scene, teenage Samuel asks May if she read something that she wrote. She replies with disapproval that what he wrote was too sexually provocative. “There will always be a call for titillation,” May says dismissively.
When he asks her again, “Did you read it?” May snarls with contempt: “What a waste!” May hurling this insult at Samuel is a memory that is shown more than once in the movie at different points in Samuel’s life. There are a few flashbacks of May shouting “What a waste!,” as a way to show how Samuel has long-lasting emotional scars from being verbally abused by his mother.
When young adult Samuel announces to May that he wants to move to Paris to become a writer and will never go back to Ireland, May makes this bigoted and bizarre remark about continental Europe: “The continent is populated almost entirely by homosexuals.” Samuel says that May is flawed if she thinks she can control him. “I gave you everything,” May says indignantly. Samuel replies, “I hope for your sake it’s not true.”
This is the type of dialogue that you might expect from a second-rate soap opera, not a biopic about a “literary genius.” But it goes on like this for the rest of “Dance First.” Much credit should be given to the talented cast members who do the best they can with the often-cringeworthy lines that they have to utter.
The movie’s chapter “Lucia” shows Samuel as a college student in Paris. Samuel meets a young woman about the same age named Lucia Joyce (played by Gráinne Good), a singer/dancer who happens to be the daughter of acclaimed author James Joyce (played by Aiden Gillen), who is one of Samuel’s idols. There’s a scene where Samuel verbally gushes over James like a fanboy. However, James seems somewhat jaded and unimpressed by this young admirer, who ends up working with James as an assistant. Samuel and Lucia have a doomed romance that is also given the soap opera treatment in this movie.
The movie’s chapter “Alfy” is about the period of Samuel’s life when he joined the French Resistance against the Nazis. The chapter’s namesake is Alfred Péron (played by Robert Aramayo), a French Jew who befriends Samuel. In real life, Péron was Beckett’s French teacher when Beckett was a student at Trinity College in Dublin. It’s in this chapter that Samuel meets young adult Suzanne (played by Léonie Lojkine), who becomes his most trusted person to give him advice and evaluations for his writing.
The chapter titled “Suzanne” shows the troubled marriage of Samuel and Suzanne, who have a better relationship as artists than as spouses. Samuel is chronically unfaithful to Suzanne, but another woman unexpectedly captures his heart when they begin a relationship in the late 1950s: Barbara Bray (played by Maxine Peake), a British widow who worked as a script editor for the BBC. Barbara is warm and understanding as an obvious counterpoint to Suzanne, who can be cold and critical.
Samuel and Suzanne were dating each other but not yet married when Samuel got involved with Barbara. Samuel ultimately choses to marry Suzanne. The movie shows Samuel and Suzanne eloping in a very simple civil ceremony. Barbara takes the rejection in stride and continues to be involved with Samuel, although the movie makes it look like their relationship became platonic in their elderly years.
According to “Dance First,” Samuel married Suzanne because he felt that Suzanne was better than Barbara for giving brutally honest reviews of his work. A Freudian psychologist would have a field day in an analysis of how the dynamics between Samuel and Suzanne are a repeat of the dynamics between Samuel and his mother, although Suzanne was not as vicious as Samuel’s mother.
The chapter titled “Le Fin” (which means “The End” in French) shows the last years of Samuel’s life. By the time the movie reaches this point, there are major milestones and artistic achievements that the real Beckett had that are never seen in the movie. Byrne and Bonnaire give fine performances as a married couple who have learned to live with a very flawed marriage. However, the artistic bond that holds the marriage together is woefully underrepresented in “Dance First.”
It’s frustratingly counterproductive to make a movie that revolves largely around a marriage where the spouses’ only enduring respect for each other is as artists, but then the movie never bothers to show meaningful scenes of them creating this art that is so important to them. There are some bland scenes of Samuel using a typewriter, or Suzanne reading snippets of Samuel’s work back to him and telling him what she thinks. Even though the movie’s black and white cinematography looks great, “Dance First” is not the movie to see if you want to get fascinating behind-the-scenes stories about how the real Beckett created his most influential work. “Dance First” is told in chapters, but it’s like reading a biography where many of the chapters that should be there were deliberately removed.
Magnolia Pictures released “Dance First” in select U.S. cinemas on August 9, 2024. The movie was released on digital and VOD on August 16, 2024.
