User reviews

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.

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 watched six Quentin Dupieux movies. WRONG/REALITY/LE DAIM/MANDIBULES/ Incroyable mais vrai and this one. DAAAAAALI! Is my least favorite movie of his. Up until now, the only movie which i would not have recommended was LE DAIM. But even LE DAIM is better than this.

It's like Dupieux ran out of ideas and artistically, he is on a decline. At times i felt i was watching just a rehash of his previous movies. This is a 67 minutes movie and still felt boring at times. There are still clever and funny moments here and there, Dupieux remains a unique and capable artist. But i think he should take a break in order to find his rhythm. Too many movies in the last years.

The Dupieux Inception made me laugh so much, I never know what to expect but it's an intergalactic foot every time, plus I love Dali! A little tripoté of actor to embody Dali, a divinatory Dali, timeless, in a film that seems to resume the end of 2001 without any limit. I won't be able to tell you what it means, but it's pretty crazy! No limit in time, logic, meaning?

It is the story of an interview, in a dream, in a film, in a painting, in an interview, in a dream, in a film, in a painting, etc, etc... It is crazy and I love and for me, it is Jonathan Cohen who gives the most life to the eccentric character, it is an absolute treat to see him take all the tics of the master!

I recommend to those who like the Dupieux style, the others, will be completely strawberry, as every time:D.

I find probably true that you've never seen a movie like this. This kind of titles feel rare and so fresh that deserves all the atention of worldwide cinephiles.

The plot of the movie doesn't give too much away, and that's because this movie defies expectations until his very end. Weirldy funny and with a meta narrative like you've never seen.

Quentin Dupieux's cinema convinces through the understanding and precise conception of the absurd as the axis in his stories, and Daaaaaali! It is a demonstration of this. But not only for that merit does he emerge victorious, but his films also turn out to be active conversational exercises that dialogue with the viewer about how we absorb what we see on a big screen, and what are the emotions and sensations involved when watching a film. .

Please support this movies.

As she puts it herself, Judith was a pharmacist but it was way too boring, so she decided to be a journalist instead. So she becomes obsessed with the idea of interviewing Salvador Dalí for a magazine, but will she?

Quentin Dupieux is a master of making glued to the screen and laughing out loud even if there is no real plot in the film. In spite of Dalí, excuse me, Daaaaaalí involved, this one is more absurdism rather than surrealism, which is perfectly to my taste. The setting here is more significant than the content, and every moment, you never know what you're gonna see next. Pure cinematographic pleasure!

P. S. A great collaboration with Thomas Bangalter from Daft Punk for the music.

Saw this at the Rotterdam film festival (IFFR) 2024. I was glad to watch the newest movie of this filmmaker and find it deserving the maximum 10/10 score. Following him since Rubber (2010) which I admired greatly, I found subsequent movies suiting me less and less. That is... until today. So very happy to find him again back on track.

Dahli's basic attitude seems very well visualized (I hear from others; I know nothing of Dali). Ditto his obsession with age and his looks. We see a small painting from someone else, signed by him and being sold for 10M on an auction, demonstrating how much his signature is worth, and that its perceived value has nothing to do with the quality of the painting itself.

Nice running gag with the young journalist chasing him repeatedly for an interview, failing each time but getting a fresh chance again and again. The time paradoxes around the dream told by the priest, are a nice find too, also serving as sort of a running gag with many variations, surprising and confusing us repeatedly during the story, until and within the final credits.

All in all, chronology in filmmaking is boring; humor and confusion come instead. I scored a maximum 5 out of 5 for the audience award after the screening. And finally, a friendly advice: stay put and don't run away when the credits start rolling.

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.