Film review: Dance First is a Beckett biopic that's no deadener

Dance First: A Life Of Samuel Beckett: The film charts the Irish writer Samuel Beckett’s life, from his time as a fighter for the French Resistance during the Second World War to his literary rise to winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969. Starring Gabriel Byrne and Aidan Gillen.

• Dance First 
• ★★★★☆
• Cinema release

“Whose forgiveness do you need the most?” asks Samuel Beckett (Gabriel Byrne) of himself as Dance First (12A) begins, in the wake of a hallucinatory experience that occurs after Beckett reluctantly accepts his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.

Having retreated to some cave of the mind, where he discourses with his alter-ego (also played by Gabriel Byrne), the young Beckett (now played by Fionn O’Shea) embarks on a remembered ‘journey of shame’ that starts during his formative years, when he clashes with his severe, controlling mother May (Lisa Dwyer Hogg), and proceeds via his encounters with James Joyce (Aidan Gillen), Joyce’s daughter Lucia (Gráinne Good), his fellow translator and WWII resistance fighter, Alfy (Robert Aramayo), and Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil (Sandrine Bonnaire), the woman who understood him best of all.

That the film will be an austere, brooding affair by way of paying homage to its complex hero is a given, but Fionn O’Shea and Gabriel Byrne are both terrific at hinting at Beckett’s mordant sense of humour, and not least when the writer is pointing up his own failings.

Beckett aficionados will likely wish for more insight into the author’s craft and the business of transferring that singular mind to the page, but this potted biography is largely concerned with Beckett’s personal relationships, and how they might have come to colour his work.

It’s a conceit that works, and especially during those parts of the film that deal with Beckett’s calculating hero-worship of Joyce, and his unexpected willingness — given his long-established mono-maniacal egoism — to devote himself to the cause of the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation of Paris.

It may be true, as Suzanne wearily observes of their relationship, that she and Beckett were ‘not made for victory’, but Dance First is a literary biopic that deserves all the garlands that come its way.