Surrealist film-maker makes film about surrealist artist shock. Daaaaaalí! is the result, and you wonder why Quentin Dupieux, who’s only a semi-serious surrealist really, didn’t do it before.
Dupieux starts off with a bit of comedy. Judith, a nervous young reporter played by Anaïs Demoustier, stands in a corridor with the great painter’s assistant, awaiting his arrival. Here he comes, says the right-hand woman, and indeed it is the legend himself, barrelling towards them down the corridor, his signature moustache pointing skyward, his mouth working at a mile a minute as this ball of self-regard and practised eccentricity approaches them.
Except he never seems quite to arrive. In a scene familiar from an anxious dream, even some minutes later the famous artist is in the corridor, still approaching, still talking, still gesticulating, and setting Judith into even more of a flap than she was already.
He does eventually arrive and immediately cancels the interview after discovering that it is for a magazine – no cameras, no Dalí, he harrumphs. And that’s the entire movie in a snapshot. Judith trying to bag her interview, Dalí impishly staying out of reach.
Dupieux is being impish too, but then that is his style. There are six different actors playing Dalí, four of them variations on the Dalí famous from the pictures – dark of hair, wild of expression, a moustache like a smirk – the fifth an older, white-haired Dalí, who periodically horrifies the others by appearing, and the sixth a guy in the street with a Dalí-adjacent moustache who might or not be something to do with the “real” ones.
Why so many? Because that’s the way dreams (and surrealism) work, and Dupieux has decided to make his film using dream logic. In fact the central chunk of it involves a dream sequence which appears to come to an end but in fact hasn’t, and then appears to end again but still hasn’t, and so on. There are elements of this film lifted from Monty Python (Dupieux is a fan), and the variation on their “No, dear, this is the dream, you’re still in the cell” gag is one of them.
Demoustier keeps a straight face and plays it absolutely down the line as the reporter keen to get her story. Romain Duris is her self-serving boss with horrible table manners, the fact that Dupieux can pull these two another indicator of high regard in which he is held. He’s also got Thomas Bangalter, one half of Daft Punk, to do the music, which (impishly) consists of Bangalter banging away jauntily on an old zither.
Dupieux’s central idea is that Dalí wasn’t really much of a painter – one of the Dális says as much – but that his contribution to the world was the character of the public Dalí, a powder puff fraud and self-promoter extraordinaire.
For variation Dupieux drops in occasional tableaux vivants of famous Dalí pictures as they’re being painted, and at other times gives us surreal visual gags, like Dalí using live pigeons in a clay-pigeon shoot.
If you’ve seen a few Dupieux films you either like what he does – he’s always interesting – but even so you might be tiring of the levity. Too much joke, dangerously little poke would be a fair assessment. But then this is the director who started out as the club DJ Mr Oizo, who invented Flat Eric, a puppet with a funny, lollopping dance style.
Still, by the time Dupieux brings down the curtain he has managed to conjure a rather odd world, where the hallucination, the dream and eruptions from the unconscious mind fight with reality for control. Where is the line between them? How easily we are blown off course, by drugs, perhaps, or by a flamboyant charlatan simply inviting us to let go.
It’s best seen this way, as a meditation and as a joke. Dupieux somehow keeps both sides of the equation in play. And if you hate it, it’s only 77 minutes long.
Daaaaaalí! – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
