Daaaaaali! Serving surreal for dinner
The logic and visual vocabulary of Salvador Dalí’s paintings feed into Daaaaaali!, a tribute to the pioneering Surrealist by Quentin Dupieux
Salvador Dalí swaggers along a hotel corridor on the way to a press interview. Wearing a long cape, brandishing a gilded cane, sporting upturned waxed whiskers, and drawing out every syllable dramatically as he speaks, the Spanish painter swaggers and swaggers along, but the destination doesn’t get any closer. Reality falters in its security. Solid concepts of time and space melt like Camembert. Clocks drooped, heads malformed, and ants swarmed over decay — Dalí’s paintings dreamed a world in continuous flux. The distinct logic and visual vocabulary of his dreams feed into the discreet charms of Daaaaaali!, a loopy tribute to a pioneering Surrealist from one of his cinematic heirs.
The farcical meets the banal in the films of Quentin Dupieux. Mandibles (2020) took the outrageous scheme of two goofy criminals training a giant fly as a bank-robbing drone, and treated it like an ordinary romp. Incredible But True (2022) allegorised how a prolonged lockdown had changed our relationship with time — our biological clocks to be precise. While a suburban couple grow apart quite literally on discovering a portal in their basement, another man upgrades to a Bluetooth-enabled, three-speed electronic penis to regain his lost youth. Deerskin (2019) concerned a suede jacket driving its wearer to murder. Rubber (2010) pivoted on a sentient tire named Robert who goes on a homicidal spree. Everyday objects harbour malicious intent. In fact, the opening monologue of Rubber could be read as the guiding principle of Dupieux’s filmography so far: “All great films, without exception, contain an important element of ‘no reason.’ And you know why? Because life itself is filled with no reason.” Some entries may be greater than others in the Dupieux canon. But in each one of them, the states of dream and reality resolve into a mode of surreality.
Among the sceptics, the word “biopic” tends to evoke fears of straightforward cause-and-effect formalism. But Dupieux calling Daaaaaali! a “real fake biopic” should alone signal his decidedly more playful approach. Rest assured, at under 80 minutes, the film earns the exclamation point and all the surplus vowels in its title. Anaïs Demoustier plays Judith, a pharmacist-turned-journalist assigned by a magazine to get an exclusive interview with Dalí – an assignment not made the least bit easy by a notoriously eccentric artist prone to changing his mind on a whim.
Not one, not two, but five different actors play Dalí at different ages: Édouard Baer, Gilles Lellouche, Pio Marmaï, Jonathan Cohen and Didier Flamand. Old or mid-life, the magnitude of his personality and the heaviness of his Catalan accent when he speaks French remain more or less the same. Each actor assumes the role with devilish flamboyance, rolling every ‘r’ with guttural emphasis. Sometimes, two Dalís appear in the same scene. When a middle-aged Dalí catches sight of his wheelchair-bound, geriatric counterpart, this disruption of linearity feels like time haunting him into confronting his mortality and, to a lesser extent, his legacy.
In keeping with the mercurial nature of his subject, Dupieux mounts a scrappy collage that does away with notions of truthful representation. Dalí was as vainglorious as contradictory. “I don’t do drugs,” he once claimed. “I am drugs.” He was a habitual illeist: “Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy, the joy of being Salvador Dalí, and I ask myself in rapture, ‘What wonderful things is this Salvador Dalí going to accomplish today?’” His talent for self-promotion matched — arguably even surpassed — his talent for painting. He spent much of his life renewing and cashing in on his personal symbology. Surrealist peers inevitably dismissed him as a sellout. André Breton gave him the anagrammatic nickname “Avida Dollars.” Detractors only grew in numbers over his lifetime due to his public support for the Francisco Franco regime. But being friends with a ruthless fascist is what allowed him to build a museum dedicated to himself.
Dalí took what he called a paranoiac-critical approach to his paintings. Dupieux takes what can be called the megalomaniac-farcical approach to his film about Dalí. By immersing himself in the self-important condition of an artist whose life was a performance as grandiose as his art, Dupieux is able to tap into the inner realms of a creative subconscious and pour their combined obsessions into madcap form on screen. Handling writing, directing, editing, and cinematography duties, as he has done throughout his prolific career, French cinema’s surrealist supreme is firing on all cylinders here. The editing, in particular, twists and turns to the rhythms of a dream.
Each of Judith’s interview attempts are laced together with all manner of absurd gags. In the opening gag, reality distorts around Dalí as he walks down the hotel corridor, giving Judith the buffer time to sort out some final requirements. Most important of which is his beverage of choice: sparkling water. She double-checks everything so as to not give him a reason to cut the interview short over some trivial grievance. Despite all her efforts, he leaves in a huff, objecting to being profiled in print. He won’t talk unless he is filmed on camera, the biggest one available.
So, the determined Judith manages to find a producer (Romain Duris) interested in funding a filmed interview. But the second attempt is frustrated by another tantrum. This time, Dalí’s insistence on parking his Rolls Royce on a beach ends with the car crashing into the camera. Costs inflate.The producer is incensed. Julie, however, must keep her calm to justify the time and money invested. This futile battle against a monstrous ego encapsulates the headache of unmasking the person behind the persona of subjects eager to control the narrative about themselves. When the cult of personality is inextricable from their work, the challenge only becomes harder.
As a young woman looking for a big break upon changing professions, Judith is faced with the most overwhelming hurdle: an outsize male ego housed in the imposing frame of a walking self-parody. At one point, Dalí turns the camera on a moustachioed Judith, putting her on the spot in hopes of learning how others see him. With such a cultivated persona as Dalí’s, Dupieux acknowledges our own understanding can only ever be skin deep. At another point, Dalí grabs the breast of his make-up artist who is quick to dismiss it as an act of artistic curiosity, rather than sexual harassment — an example of how terrible behaviour is so often excused in the name of art and genius.
One of the more playful touches in the film is a tableaux vivant recreating the 1932 painting, La harpe invisible, fine et moyenne (The Fine and Average Invisible Harp). Dupieux reinforces Dalí’s aesthetic of the irrational by envisioning the artist staging the dreamscape to reproduce on canvas, instead of painting directly from the mind. One model has a cigarette dangling from his lips. The other has an enlarged head resting on a forked wooden stick and a handkerchief in his mouth. Both are tired posing in the hot sun. Both are desperate for a break — which comes when Judith calls to schedule an interview.
While Judith pulls out all the stops, Dalí and his wife Gala (Catherine Schaub-Abkarian) are invited to a dinner by his gardener. At this dinner, one of the other guests is a priest (Eric Naggar) who recounts a dream he believes may inspire Dalí to make a painting out of it. Only the dream turns out to be part of a much longer dream. With each false awakening, we are knocked off-kilter, less and less sure of where the dream ends and reality begins.
The dinner scene plays like a séance of sorts, summoning the spirit of not just Dalí but also his compatriot and former collaborator Luis Buñuel. In The Exterminating Angel (1962), wealthy guests at a dinner party find themselves unable to leave. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) Buñuel conceptualised the inverse: six Parisian socialites sit down for a meal that never comes. Misunderstandings and plain bizarre complications keep both groups from achieving a simple enough outcome. Every interruption only heightens the surreality. As is the case with the dinner and the interview attempts in Daaaaaali!, the more the conceit repeats, the more dreamlike it becomes. “You have to systematically create confusion; it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life,” Dalí said. And Dupieux sure took his advice wholeheartedly.
Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.
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