As his entire public life was a performance — grandiose, extravagant and self-important to the point of silly — it’s no wonder actors have a lot of fun portraying the flamboyant surrealist Salvador Dalí.
Sir Ben Kingsley chewed the canvas if not the scenery itself of “Daliland,” with Ezra Miller taking on nearly-as-narcissistic younger version of the painter. Adrien Brody underplayed him and pretty much stole “Midnight in Paris” as just a bit player. Robert Pattinson had a go at a gay-and-conflicted (and not nearly as much fun) Dalí in “Little Ashes,” and “Trainspotting’s” Ewen Bremner had a funny go at him in a British TV movie.
Imagine what the surrealist filmmaker we first met when he showed us a sentient, murderous runaway tire (“Rubber”), and went on to dazzle and puzzle viewers with “Mandibles,” “Smoking Causes Coughing” and “Incredible But True” could do with Dalí.
French filmmaker Quentin Dupieux serves up six Dalís for his brisk, bracing burlesque “Daaaaaalí!” That’s one Dalí for every “a” in the title, which is taken from the way the various players perform the way the affected, over-the-top and hilariously narcissistic Catalan said his name, always speaking of himself in the third person.
As in “Do you really think Daaaaaalí needs people other than himself to imagine in his stead?” And “Daaaaaalí no longer wishes the make the film! Period! NEXT paragraph!”
His driver brings him to an interview, and doesn’t want to take the Rolls Royce onto the beach because “A Rolls (Royce) is not made for sand?”
“John Lennon has one JUST like it! Drive on! Daaaaaalí has decided!”
You can’t always tell which actor — Edouard Baer,
Gilles Lellouche, Pio Marmaï, Jonathan Cohen, with Boris Gillot, and Didier Flamand as the most aged version of the painter – is playing Dalí, as they all sport the overlong and wildly-waxed mustache, the flowing hair and comically mad, penetrating eyes. They’re all fun and having serious fun with the character and the material.
The clever conceit here is a sort of “Waiting for Godot” riff on “My Dinner with Daaaaaalí.” A pharmacist turned journalist (Anaïs Demoustier of “Smoking Causes Coughing”) has landed an interview with greatest living artist. (I’m assuming the setting is the mid-70s, just after Picasso’s death).
She awaits him in a hotel room, and then he makes his entrance. She is summoned to the hotel hallway to watch as the caped crusader of melting clocks sweeps down a corridor of almost surreal length, prattling on about how “ill-conceived” this building is, his signature posh cane in hand, double-breasted suit under all that hair, that mustache and that cape.
“Where are your cameras, your microphone,” he wants to know (in French with English subtitles)? She has none. She has pitched this “portrait” to a magazine. No, this will never do. “How can you interview Dalí without a camera?” How can anyone hope to capture the performance that is Dalí with just “your little notepad.” He is “not the least bit interested.”
He grandly and gallantly kisses her hand and storms out.
Thus begins poor Judith Rochant’s immersion in the surreal, as she re-pitches the story as a documentary to a film boorish film producer (Romain Duris, hilarious) and struggles, time and again, to set up and conduct an interview with a larger-than-life figure who “hasn’t a minute to spare.”
Judith has hallucinations about these encounters, but as she struggles to get him on camera and on mike and to keep the old master from making the interview about her, the film becomes a film within a film within other films.
Dalí takes dinner with the family of the groundskeeper of his seaside villa in the South of France. A priest (Éric Naggar) has coerced their host to set up this simple meal of “ragu” — which Dalí envisions is made of worms — so that he can relate a dream to the artist and his wife Gala (Catherine Schaub-Abkarian).
As the movie progresses, the interview keeps going wrong and the priest’s “dream” comes to encompass the narrative, taking the story further into the surreal.
One can assume that every time the artist is shocked at seeing the aged version of himself (Flamand) that we are seeing the elderly Dalí as he saw himself, as younger and vibrant and creative and dashing, even into his dotage.
There’s madness afoot, and Demoustier ably captures how overmatched a mere interviewer would always be with Dalí. And the various actors playing Dalí indulge in grand vamping of the genius in a script that only occasionally hints at his sense of his own mortality.
Dupieux has fun with Dalí’s working methods, suggesting he was using artist models who look as bizarre as he imagines them. The surreal filmmaker has the surrealist painter take a call with an “I cannot speak now! It’s raining dead dogs!” And so it is. Who could talk on the phone over such a “diabolical din?”
This short, clever-but-truncated dip into Dalí reminds us that there have been decades of talk about making a proper film biography of this charismatic, colorful and influencial rock star of 20th century art. Al Pacino was to play him at one time.
But one does wonder, after all the documentaries with Dalí as Dalí, after Oscar-winners Kingsley and Brody had their shots, and now a genuine surrealist and half a dozen actors have given us a humorous glimpse of how he saw the world, and how he hilariously carried himself in it, what would be the point?
Rating: unrated, profanity
Cast: Anaïs Demoustier, Edouard Baer,Gilles Lellouche, Pio Marmaï, Jonathan Cohen, Didier Flamand, Boris Gillot, Catherine Schaub-Abkarian, Éric Naggar and Romain Duris
Credits: Scripted and directed by Quentin Dupieux. A Music Box release.
Running time: 1:17
Movie Nation 