Come and Go (2000 TV Short) User Reviews

Powerful Beckett Hampered by Rather Lacklustre Direction

[Different_Voices · 6/10 · 12 August 2006]

Many critics have argued that master surrealist Samuel Beckett's work should never be put on film, and with Come and Go its not hard to see why. The play is a stark, brutal examination, of what can fester under the surface over time. The basic premise centres around a group of three women, all of whom are meeting up again after a few years of absence. As the play progresses, they all reveal a horrible secret about each other, leading the audience to believe that maybe there's something hiding under the surface, something terrible that we can't quite make out...

A lot can be drawn from Beckett's work and that's what marks him out as a wonderful stylist. Interpretations of his plays are open and can be read as one sees appropriate. I for one, think that Come and Go is a fable about how we lie to each other, and even ourselves. The meeting initially seems perfect but sooner or later we see the cracks emerge and this is really where the play becomes more universal. Its an exploration of all of our lives: how we all want to pretend everything is perfect, when really we're rotting away under the surface...

But now I better get to the crux of the matter: this film version really isn't that good. The direction is quite poor. Although there are some nice touches (characters eyes are obscured by their over-sized hats) the director makes a fatal mistake: the camera moves far too often. Although this sounds quite simple, it is a fatal flaw. By zooming and panning and dollying we are immediately reminded that we are watching a film, and thus are removed from the work.

This is very unfortunate. It would have been nice to see a better director handle the piece in a more interesting way. Maybe we could have had an exceptional film.

However it would take someone like Michael Bay to mess up such a wonderful script to the point of it being a truly awful cinematic experience. At the moment we're left with a wasted opportunity: a film that could have been exceptional but is simply average.

Shame, isn't it?

more to admire then like

[dbborroughs · 4/10 · 23 January 2010]

Shortest of Beckett's works (word count wise, Breath excluded) has three women sitting on a bench talking of old days. When one leaves for a moment, one of the remaining two says something terrible about the one not there. In the end they then hold hands in the old fashion way linked as they are in illusion and delusion.

Well made film, continues to elude me. The seeming central idea that we remain together despite feeling terrible about our friends leaves me feeling "yes and...?" As a cinematic exercise its clever film to admire more than like. As a anything else its not much of anything.

It is an empty film.

I beg to differ with Dr. Twisted's Review!

[Tahhh · 10/10 · 11 December 2006]

I was very surprised to discover that someone did NOT like this film of the Beckett play, or rather "dramaticule," as he called it--for it is a mere eight or nine minutes in length.

First, I really do not think that the camera motion detracts in the slightest from the action, which is considerably more colorful and "fun" than many Beckett pieces--and I could not possibly ask for a better cast, three marvelous actresses, with magnificent control of comic timing and sound, who, in spite of the terrifying constraints Beckett places on expression (he insists that the faces should be all but hidden under broad hats, and the bodies cloaked in full-length coats), manage to create CHARACTERS with hardly more than a handful of lines apiece! Perhaps the single directorial imposition on the cryptic script is, in my opinion an excellent one--and this is the spoiler, so stop reading if you haven't seen the film yet--the puzzling last line, "I can feel the rings!"--is given a much deeper and unexpected meaning, which had never occurred to me: the camera moves in closely on Flo's holding, first, Ru's hand--feeling at what would be her left ring finger--and then Vi's hand--again, using her thumb to stroke gently the empty space where a wedding ring would be worn--feeling the ring fingers of her girlhood companions, as she did as a child, at Miss Wade's...she says, perhaps as she might have said as a little girl, "I can feel the rings!" This huge puzzle of a curtain line is given real, human MEANING--in my opinion, for the first time in ANY production--and this otherwise stark, cold, mysterious Noh drama of a playlet suddenly ends with a very charming and warm image of the three old maids, remembering how, as girls, they anticipated a future as beloved wives--a prospect which, apparently, was never realized, and now, all three are (presumably) dying, although none of them know that their ends are coming soon--"God grant not!" Bottom line--I thought this was a SPECTACULARLY good transfer of this tiny little gem of a dark tragicomedy to film--and was absolutely delighted with it.

Naturally, Beckett isn't going to be everybody's cup of tea--but if you DO get in the mood for his abstract, dark vision, now and then, I doubt that you'll find this a disappointing setting of his "dramaticule." The entire series this is from, "Beckett on Film," is worth a look--a project to commit all 19 plays in Beckett's corpus to film.

Life in eight minutes

[miloc · 9/10 · 19 November 2009]

The first line trades off of Macbeth: "When did we three meet last?" But her companion will have none of that: "Let us not speak."

Three women occupy a park bench. One by one they leave, strolling into the opaque darkness at the edge of the stage, and come back. As each vanishes, her two friends share a secret. At the end they join hands "in the old way," and the sudden, smooth unity between the three shadowy characters can make your neck-hairs stand straight up.

The essence of Beckettian minimalism, this extraordinarily rich "dramaticule" consists of about a hundred and thirty words, surrounded by long, opulent silences. It's an almost blank slate and it's magnificent. Peter Brook classified Beckett's work as "Holy Theater" -- that which strives to make the invisible visible -- and of all the showy adaptations in the Beckett on Film series, this simply staged eight-minute ceremony best supports Brook's notion. To be watched and rewatched.

A Beautiful Picture

[matthewjbond · 10/10 · 9 February 2007]

"Come and Go" is one of Beckett's most beautiful works. John Crowley did an excellent job transferring it to the screen. His pacing was wonderful, slow to the point of snail-paced but never sluggish. He brought the camera in for the whispering, then brought it back out when a return of one of the three was imminent. He lit the area precisely: The bench was invisible, and the women walked into darkness, being enveloped as if leisurely entering the void.

Crowley recognized that "Come and Go" exists as a series of pictures (woman in red, woman in violet, woman in yellow), and he showed their bare, unadorned hands before that beautiful last line, "I can feel the rings", but he didn't give us a close-up of the face saying it. Crowley's work here is a lesson that more of the other directors should have followed.