It wouldn’t be a stretch to claim that Daaaaaalí!, Quentin Dupieux’s 77-minute portrait of the surrealist artist, is a biography of some kind. Nor would it, in this writer’s estimation, unsettle the boundaries of credibility to label it a work of documentary. The real Salvador Dalí had imbibed surrealism in his own life as much as he did in his art, cultivating a persona at once outlandish, wicked, grandiose, and inexplicable. From episodes of childhood violence to his fascist sympathies for Francisco Franco, along with his financial shenanigans ranging from exorbitant demands (to be paid $100,000 an hour on the set of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s failed Dune project) to outright fraud (passing his signature along to be stamped onto imitations of his work), little appeared sacred to the indomitable master of his art, even the subject of art itself. “Extremely eccentric and simultaneously concentric,” concurs Dalí — one of many — onscreen. “That’s why I am both anarchist and monarchist.”
But what would a documentary-cum-biography of Salvador Dalí really look like? Or, to rephrase the question, what documentation or biographical narrativization could do justice to a larger-than-life persona? Dupieux’s film, for starters, elongates the name: with not one “a” but six, and with an exclamation by way of conclusion, “Dalí” shifts from trochaic matter to spondaic majesty, auguring Dalís real, imagined, invented, and impossible. Daaaaaalí! also extends the artist’s myth, co-opting its own filmic space as a canvas for frequently strange and surreal representations. Time loops; dreams recur; a mousy French journalist named Judith (Anaïs Demoustier) repeatedly fails to get an interview with Dalí and in turn becomes his interview subject; Dalí himself is played by Gilles Lelouche, Édouard Baer, Jonathan Cohen, Pio Marmaï, and Didier Flamand (for the geriatric version). There is a scene early on, as Judith gets ready to receive the flamboyant painter in her hotel, when he appears in the corridor and never seems to be able to get to her. Unsurprisingly, neither party appears flustered.
There’s more, of course, but the nagging feeling that soon sets in and doesn’t quite slink away is that Dupieux’s surrealist homage arrives always at a remove: a bit too little, a bit too late. The film’s treatment of Dalí is never quite reverential — and indeed mocking at times — which renders much of it parody, as opposed to pastiche; nonetheless, the vehemence of its proceedings is dulled by repetition ad nauseam, in particular of tricks recycled from Dupieux’s earlier and more formally accomplished works, such as 2014’s Reality. Slight gags become star attractions: instances of dream logic are sprinkled, effervescent, across the runtime, but nothing really coheres or stands out. Perhaps this is less Dupieux’s fault than it is Dalí’s, for Daaaaaalí! can’t quite decide whose authorial voice it should adopt and whose merely to study. “If I paint it, I’m the creator,” declares the cultish auteur. But what if you filmed it?
DIRECTOR: Quentin Dupieux; CAST: Gilles Lellouche, Édouard Baer, Pio Marmaï, Pierre Niney; DISTRIBUTOR: Music Box Films; IN THEATERS: October 4; STREAMING: October 22; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 17 min.
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