Samuel Beckett he sits tensely at the Nobel Prize for Literature ceremony. His wife by his side, Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil also not bursting with joy. When Beckett’s name is mentioned and the applause starts, the writer stares down in front of him.
What a disaster!
he grimaces.
This is how 2024 begins Dance first! film, which undertakes no less than to present one of the most significant Irish poets and playwrights of the 20th century. This sentence is a striking addition to the biography of the legendarily aloof and always gloomy writer, and it is said to have actually been said at the 1969 award ceremony, but not by Beckett, but by his wife. This does not change the essence: the modest couple simply did not desire success and the fame that comes with it. Anyway, Beckett was not enthusiastic about having a book written about him, he only approved it towards the end of his life James KnowlsonProfessor of French at the University of Reading and founder of the Beckett Collection, to produce a biography of him – fittingly Doomed to fame title, and on the condition that it can only be published after the death of the writer. If only he knew that a 100-minute film is now dissecting his life!
It seems that no major literary figure can survive biopics (the recent one, for example About Tolkien, About Salingerobsession About Hemingway also). Beckett’s story James Marsh directed by someone who already has experience in the genre, not just any: he directed the 2014 Stephen Hawking processing his life The Theory of Everythingt, which was a big hit, won several awards and a few Oscar nominations. By the way, Marsh already has an Oscar, only in the documentary category: in 2008 Man on high earned the statuette with the film, which is a French tightrope walker, Philippe Petit tells about his famous stunt and its preparations: In 1974, Petit walked across the wire rope stretched between the two towers of the World Trade Center.
However, one cannot simply tell about Beckett within a traditional biographical framework, the Scottish screenwriter, Neil Forsyth tries to bring some absurdity into the story: when the one playing Beckett Gabriel Byrne after the Nobel is announced, he sweeps onto the stage (at the Vígszínház anyway, because the film was shot in Budapest), instead of giving a thank-you speech, he pockets the prize money and, to the surprise of the audience, energetically climbs a secluded ladder, only to enter nowhere through a cave-like cavity: an empty, sandy , into a space with gray light.
In this Godot-like frame, the biography then comes to life, as the reminiscing Becketts dedicate a carefully labeled storyline to acquaintances who have been hurt in the past. This solution seems more contrived than striking, and the drama of the past is made completely impossible by dry analysis. Gabriel Byrne puts his all into these scenes that take place out of nowhere: the 73-year-old Irish actor was a great choice for the role, which is why he can be entertaining as the writer deals with the events of his life, and Beckett’s human face also appears in Byrne’s performance. The author, who recedes into the background in reality and thus has become somewhat mystical in public opinion, is gloomy here as well, but also self-ironic and fallible.
“This film is an attempt to give flesh and blood to someone that people know very little about,” Byrne told the Guardian, logging in via Zoom from the Budapest shoot. “Beckett had a sense of humor, he was deeply emotional, he experienced his own achievements as failures for most of his life, and then after winning the Nobel Prize he had to deal with world success. He spent his last years alone in a nursing home, in a very simple room.”
It is no coincidence that Beckett, who appears in the film, has to face himself: he struggles with strong self-loathing, full of hurt people from his past. So he sets about going through the list of grudges he has acquired over the years to figure out who he could give the money he won with the Nobel Prize to in order to make amends for one of his past mistakes or to pay off an old debt.
Do you know how much shame you will have to relive?
he asks himself.
And there is indeed no shortage of guilt in the stories that come to life, but at least Samuel Beckett’s life – unlike his most famous plays – was full of events. Each broken relationship is a chapter from the writer’s life here. The cheerful country childhood is overshadowed by the early death of Beckett’s father (here Forsyth lived with some freedom as a writer, because in reality the writer only lost his father much later) and his embittered mother (Lisa Dwyer Hogg), whom he soon leaves behind to move from gloomy Ireland to Paris. The young Beckett (whom in the memoirs Finn O’Shea plays) in the French capital, he then sets out to establish his literary career: first, as a result of his persistent bullying, he meets his role model, With James Joyce (which is reliably great Aidan Gillen plays). He takes a job with the writer, who is also of Irish origin, but because of this, he gets entangled with Joyce’s somewhat clumsy daughter. When a pimp unexpectedly stabs Beckett on a moonlit night in Paris, Beckett’s later wife, Suzanne (young Léonie Lojkine) brings him back to life, so that with the outbreak of the Second World War he joins the French resistance as a typist and translator, thus putting his life in danger again.
The Beckett clones gloomily commenting on the events do not help to enhance the dramatic atmosphere either, but they are also needed to explain in a tongue-in-cheek way why the writer feels guilty about which relationship – because this is not clear at all from most of the stories. On the one hand, because sometimes it is simply not revealed; the friend who died in the war, a Robert Aramayo shaped by Alfyt for example, according to the commentary, he was fired by Beckett, but we do not see such a thing in the story, on the contrary: Alfy is the one who recruits the writer into the resistance. On the other hand, it is hard to believe this much repentance because the young Beckett shows almost no emotion towards the characters lined up next to him. The only exception is the beloved Joyce, and it is not by chance that the relationship with her is the only memorable thread – of course, this is also largely due to Gillen, who plays the manipulative, cocky role model with great pleasure.
The film becomes really interesting painfully late: when the aging Beckett (so again played by Byrne) finally writes the Waiting for Godott, and in connection with this, fame breaks his neck, and he meets the BBC critic, Barbara Bray-jel (Maxine Peake).
Biopics about writers are not a simple genre, that is Dance first! and his well-chosen acting team tries honestly. What is strangely left out is Beckett’s own work, and how this eventful life and fraught relationships influenced the literary genius. The film is content with the fact that in the title it commemorates the Waiting for Godotnak, conjuring a kind of perception of life from the quote “dance first, think later” taken from the play. Originally, of course, this phrase is not a life motto, it is uttered in the play when the main characters want to make a character who errs in a performance for their own entertainment. In Hungarian, it sounds like this:
“Maybe if he danced first, he would think about it afterwards, of course, only if we don’t ask too much of him.”
Dance First!, 100 minutes, 2023. 24.hu: 6/10
2024-03-16 18:06:11