Daaaaaali!

This is my new favorite autobiographical format. For a persona as big and other worldly as Salvadore Dali, no one is better than Quentin Dupieux to relay it. Known for his surrealist film making and very special style, I really was intrigued to see how Quentin Dupieux would fare with an autobiography, especially that of a grand artist like Dali. This movie is very Dali if one might say so: all over the place, highly stylish but with a sure sense of purpose and artistic expression. Multiple actors interpret the eponymous character, actors of different styles ranging from the physical, the tragic to the comedic, a real star studded cast: Gilles Lellouche, Pio marmai, Jonathan Cohen et Edouard Baer. Each single one of them adding nuance and style while staying faithful to the countless live references of Dali's interviews. This is by no means a discovery of Salvadore Dali nor a proper autobiographical film. It is however a celebration of the personna: highly mystical and impossibly entertaining as was the artist. The film is centered around a fictional interview of Dali that never had a chance to materialize, sometimes because of circumstance but mostly due to Dali's eccentricities. This fictional thread is the only anchor to reality in the film, wandering between the corners of the surrealist artists' mind, memories and paintings, an expression of his approach and his art. Quentin Dupieux is on a hot roll after Yannick, and he has been for a while. A wonderful directorial mind that found its style and genre. This movie is the manifestation of how important the medium is to the art: Dali's life could never be resumed in a book or a film, it is a retelling of a unique artistic expression, one that Dupieux has successfully captured through his unique style and ravishing lens without any need for a solid plot or a conventional storytelling.

Dupieux connects to his underlying influence Bunuel through Dali. We find here of course the classic figure of the dream within the dream within the dream etc., as in the excellent 'Reality' by the same Dupieux.

Everything, like the best Bunuel, remains light and playful, thanks to the actors (extraordinary Romain Duris in particular) and the dialogues. A Dali's line in the film: "Painting represents an infinitesimally small part of Dali's personality. I consider that I make paintings that are quite mediocre, but which still allow me to express a little piece of Dali." Dupieux would perhaps say the same thing about his cinema...

Beyond the lightness and the play on dreams, we can find a vision fascinated by the madness of the artist's life, that of Dali here, and its obsession with keeping the pot boiling, constructing each moment of life like a monumental drama. Another line of dialogue: Judith: "Do you have a minute to talk? I'm not disturbing you too much?" Dali: "So, you know, artists of my stature are always absolutely disturbed by completely 'normals' people."

Biopics are among the most common films being made these days. Some are great, some are decent, and others are more than a little conventional, following rote formats so meticulously that they can turn out shallow or dull. But, when it comes to telling the story of someone wholly unconventional, someone larger than life and the embodiment of surrealistic sensibilities, the tried and true simply won't work. And that's certainly the case with enigmatic artist Salvador Dalí, whose unusual paintings nearly always defied description and classification. He was also a shameless self-promoter with an ego the size of the planet and a capricious personality as eccentric as his creations. He often spoke about himself in the third person and spouted statements that required those skilled in the cryptic arts to decipher. So, with a subject like this, a formula biography simply would not work. Fortunately, that's precisely the thinking that writer-director Quentin Dupieux employed in coming up with this outrageously funny, eminently bizarre offering about a one-of-a-kind individual. In many ways, the film is a cinematic experiment in storytelling, enlivening its narrative in a manner as surreal as one of Dalí's works. It's rarely grounded in the straightforward, taking on dream-like qualities with running jokes, repeated but altered sequences and recurring characters that intertwine with one another in unexpected, truly out-there ways. The picture loosely follows the efforts of an aspiring journalist (Anais Demoustier) to secure an interview with her subject but who is routinely met with unrealistic, unforeseen obstacles (nearly always whimsically implemented by Dalí himself) in her attempts to pull it off. And, as the movie unfolds, it becomes impossible to follow any sense of reason in trying to figure out what's going on and where it might be headed (so don't even try). Instead, just sit back and enjoy the absurdity of it all - the very same attitude that one needs to employ when gazing upon one of the artist's paintings. This highly fitting approach to telling Dalí's story works brilliantly, especially coming from a filmmaker who has his own offbeat sensibilities about art, as seen in such prior releases as "Deerskin" (2019) and "Smoking Causes Coughing" (2022). In fact, "Daaaaaalí!" is so quirky and breaks the mold in so many ways that it even features five different actors (Edouard Baer, Jonathan Cohen, Gilles Lellouche, Pio Marmai and Didier Flamand) portraying the protagonist. And, to his credit, the director thankfully keeps the runtime short at 1:18:00 so as not to overstay his welcome and let the innate joke become tiresome. Still. Some might find this a frustrating offering to watch, but, if you're willing to suspend logic and convention (as you're clearly supposed to do), you're likely to find that this hilarious little gem will tickle your funny bone in myriad, unanticipated ways. After all, if the film's subject defies easy categorization, the last thing a director should do is needlessly confine him to a claustrophobic little box. And, fortunately, that's exactly the pitfall this release successfully manages to avoid.

French, unique and clever movie.

Excellent acting performances across, much in thanks to careful directing.

The movie requires no pre-knowledge about Dali. If you've seen at least one painting, you'll notice the paintings don't seem to fall far from the artist.

Cleverly designed plot, many unexpected and witty twists - a biopic where boring chronologic is replaced by humour. The portrayal of Dali is very enjoyable, every pronounciation seems a carefully thought out way to showcase his excentric (to quote Dali) particuliarities and in some sense also decay towards the latter stages of life.

A very good film, seen at the Göteborg film festival.

I have already criticized Quentin Dupieux's films quite a bit, although I am always curious, every time I have the opportunity to see a new one.

He is an original filmmaker, that's the least that can be said about him. But the truth is that originality did not always mean quality, throughout his career. I've seen several Dupieux films that, however original they were, made no sense. Absurd arguments that, if they were sometimes amusing, were because they had so little common sense.

I think that, for the first time, at least in the films I've seen by Dupieux, his eccentricity married, almost perfectly, with a character and a script that were as eccentric, or even more so, than him.

Salvador Dalí was a phenomenon, whose fame, egocentrism, and eccentricity far exceeded his undeniable talent. Therefore, if there is a theme that fits perfectly into Dupieux's cinematic language, it is surrealism. And Dalí, being the most megalomaniac and brilliant representative of the genre (as much as this disgusted Breton and his followers), seems like the perfect character for a Dupieux film. In it, reality surpasses fiction.

Here the absurd makes perfect sense. The caricature of Dalí, simultaneously in various phases of his life, is funny, pertinent and completely plausible. And the plot feels like something out of one of his films with Bunuel or Ray, or from the many multidisciplinary experiments he has undertaken since the sixties.

It's not a masterpiece of cinema, but it's certainly the best and most interesting Dupieux film I've seen to date.