I have a feeling that Dali is a utopia that has disappeared. Both as a man and as an artist. When I think of him, I see a world where art is at the center.
—Quentin Dupieux, director of Daaaaaali!
I’m not sure there’s a living director more suited to tap into the spirit of the iconically mustachioed surrealist painter Salvador Dali than the most prolific of French auteurs, Quentin Dupieux. Thankfully far from any typical biographical approach, his new film Daaaaaali! is an ever-spiraling, meta-cinematic comedy continually waking from a dream of itself. As I write this description I can almost hear eyes rolling at the seeming pretentiousness of it all, but, like the best of Dupieux’s films, Daaaaaali! skillfully proves that artistic indulgence is alive and well, fully earning the emphatic declaration of its title. Dupieux definitely runs headlong with eyes closed into his creative impulses, but his ultimate editorial control is what sets him apart from other directors merely trying to be weird or meta for the sake of being weird or meta. The director claims to have connected with the cosmic consciousness of Dali in order to create a film that comes off exactly as he’s described it: “a declaration of love to this man.”
The film doesn’t begin with Dali, but rather with the clever frame of a particularly bland magazine interviewer (Dupieux regular Anaïs Demoustier) as our passage into the Dali experience. The perfect contrast of Demoustier’s character Judith and her pursuit of a proper Dali interview is a sort of narrative axis the film uses to revolve it’s shifting depictions and delirious dreamscapes upon. What results is quite a difficult, entertaining paradox—a film with equal parts narrative momentum and narrative abandon. Judith’s pursuit of Dali keeps evolving to eventually mirror Dupieux’s own difficulty with capturing Dali, especially once it becomes clear that the Dali of the film will not grant Judith an interview unless it involves a “cinematographe!” of considerable size. As the film tumbles in and out of nested dream narratives involving the pursuit of a proper Dali interview, it eventually emerges as a story about making, or dreaming, the perfect Dali film.
Dupieux’s tactic in Daaaaaali! is to embrace the idea that the greatest artistic accomplishment of Dali was the creation of his own outrageously sublime persona. In order to accomplish this, Dupieux casts six actors (one for every “a” in the title) to play the larger-than-life artistic figure. The ultimate effect is an echo of the 2007 Todd Haynes experiment I’m Not There, which cast everyone from Heath Ledger to Cate Blanchett in different phases of the chameleon-like musical life of Bob Dylan. But Dupieux’s experiment is actually much funnier and concise, and more akin structurally and tonally to an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The multiple actors—including Edouard Baer, Jonathan Cohen, Didier Flamand, Gilles Lellouche, Pio Marmaï, and Boris Gillot—play Dali at various ages, but often exist simultaneously in the film’s utterly indecipherable timeline. Their collective performances of Dali work seamlessly together, each actor seemingly delighted to have their turn at playing the over-enunciated and uber-egotistical artist.
Daaaaaali! is an enjoyable return to Dupieux’s penchant for nesting stories within stories, especially after his recent film Yannick, which is equally successful, but a simpler and atypically realist chamber piece by contrast. What both films have in common brings me back to the quote at the opening of this review: a world where art is at the center. Dali may be too often reduced to the guy who painted the melting clocks, which is then unfortunately reduced to a shorthand for “Surrealism,” but the influence of that style, both artistically and politically, has a far greater reach and is worth re-asserting. Because Dupieux’s films are often smaller in production value and runtime, they (not unlike Dali) also run the risk of being written off as slight, but are far from it. There is plenty of evidence that Surrealism is an ongoing and evolving practice—Alice Rohrwacher’s recent La Chimera is one of the more lovely recent examples, but you can see the movement evolve in everyone from David and Brandon Cronenberg to Guy Maddin.
As for films that directly quote Dali and Bunuel’s infamous 1929 Surrealist short film, Un Chien Andalou, there are countless examples. One of my favorite recent nods to their eye-opening cinematic influence is the shattered eye of Demi Moore in the gonzo horror film The Substance: a laceration thatseems to open the film into a decidedly surreal final passage. Yet, for all of this talk of Surrealism, Dupieux denies any labeling of Daaaaaali! as a Surrealist film, claiming: “It’s a word that no longer means anything.” No matter the label,Daaaaaali! is still a playful and often hilarious experiment for those who want to be reminded of a world that still holds a place for the artist.