I have to admit I didn’t know how to begin this review or how to describe the film Daaaaaali! It’s not a biopic about the Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dali. Director Quentin Dupieux says it’s a non-biopic. It’s not exactly a documentary either. Any synonym for bizarre would define Daaaaaali!: a whole thesaurus full of synonyms for wacky.
And I must add, it’s delightfully wacky.
Start with the fact that five actors play Dali (there are six a’s in the title because initially the director planned for more Dalis but some dropped out). They are all talented and some are probably improv actors. Interestingly, it’s hard to tell them apart because they all have that wispy, floppy hair and the waxed Dali handlebar moustache. But the director wanted each of them to invent his own Dali, with his own accented French. Like Dali himself, the film is a mad pastiche of creativity.
The premise of the film is that journalist Judith Rochant (Anaïs Demoustier) gets a primo assignment: to interview the internationally famous artist Salvador Dali for her magazine. The interview is set to take place in a hotel room; bottles of his favorite bubbly water have been ordered. Judith and her assistant Lucie (Agnès Hurstel) await his arrival. Dali arrives, and we see him waltzing toward them down the hotel corridor. Over and over again, in fact, because like many scenes in the film, it’s reprised with different cuts each time.
Once they are seated in the hotel room, Judith begins asking him questions…and Dali interrupts her. “Are you all alone?” he asks. “Where is the cinematographer? How can you interview Dali without a camera?”
Judith says, “I work for a magazine and this is my equipment,” pointing to her notebook and pen.
“In that case, I’m not interested in the slightest,” Dali says and departs.
It should not be a surprise that Dali always refers to himself in the third person.
And that’s the way it begins. Judith finds a production company, headed by Jerome (Romain Duris), who will be the producer. He assures her they have a good budget for cameras and crew to produce this film of Dali. (Dali demands the biggest movie cameras, the cameras gigantique!)
Don’t worry about the budget, Jerome tells her. Then he also advises her to have a makeover. You should look more glamorous for Dali; he will appreciate that, Jerome assures her.
The five actors who play Dali are Edouard Baer, Jonathan Cohen, Giles Lellouche, Pio Marmaï, and Didier Flamand, who plays an aging Dali, an image that haunts and horrifies the artist.
The film is a comic romp with every Dali in top form as some version of a madman, an artiste whose ego is without limit and who is never willing to sit still and answer a question. Yet Judith’s pursuit of an interview and then a film, starring Dali, continues. At one point, she even finds herself the subject of the film. Demoustier’s performance is outstanding; she convinces us she’s a serious journalist, but always with a sense of humor and her own spark of madness.
Daaaaaali! benefits by its gorgeous filming locations in Paris, in St. Cloud, at Dali’s home in Catalonia, and on the beach in Provence.
I have been a fan of Dali and the art called surrealism for a long time. My first encounter with Salvador Dali was at a major retrospective of his work at Centre Pompidou in Paris, 1980. My vivid visual memory of that exhibit is an upside-down dinner party—a table and chairs hanging upside down from the atrium ceiling with dishes, glasses, silverware (and food!) fixed on the table in realistic color. I also was able to see collections of work by Dali at the Dali Museum in London, at MOMA in NY (where his most famous painting, “Persistence of Memory,” is held), and at the Reina Sofia and Thyssen/Bornemisza museums in Madrid.
In his school days in the 1920s, Dali became friendly with an artist whose fame would match his own. The iconic filmmaker Luis Buñuel made his first film in collaboration with Dali—a famous silent short film, Un Chien Andalou, in 1929. The film used dream logic to create a disjointed narrative—something like what we see in Daaaaaali!
That is precisely what director Dupieux had in mind for his film. He said, “I really didn't want a cushy, museum-style guided tour. I wanted a film that would shake you up, turn your head upside down, take sharp turns, stop and start again.”
Daaaaaali! opens in theaters Friday, October 11, including at the Music Box Theatre.
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