Quentin Dupieux understands there is no such thing as Salvador Dalí. Once the mad Catalan decided he was going to become a walking paradox making grandiose statements about himself in the third person, Dalí the human being was a mirage. The Andy Warhol of Surrealism, Salvador Dalí was a construction. The deeper one digs into Dalí the more confounding he becomes – so why try to dig? That’s the basis of Dupieux’s anti-biopic Daaaaaalí! and in its falsity it comes the closest to capturing Dalí’s essence than more serious biographical works such as Little Ashes and Daliland.
Judith Rochant (Anaïs Demoustier) is a pharmacist turned journalist trying to interview the famous surrealist in the early 1980s. The film begins with Judith explaining how she came to be a writer, although where the film begins is questionable as Dupieux’s entire structure is oneiric. It might begin there; it might begin at the shot of a piano leaking water into a mirrored pond. Those scenes also might be the end of the film or exist elsewhere on the matryoshka doll timeline. A woman (Agnès Hurstel) comes to tell her Dalí is arriving. Judith sits and waits, watches tennis, falls asleep, and dreams of a goat eating flowers.
Dalí (Édouard Baer) eventually arrives wandering down the hotel hallway and seemingly never getting closer to Judith. He complains at how banal and tasteless the place is. We know it’s Dalí because of his signature moustache, cane, and flamboyance – but also it can’t be the Dalí of the period because he’s too young. One of Dupieux’s tricks is to have five actors randomly (or not) play the artist: Gilles Lellouche, Didier Flamand, Pio Marmaï, and Jonathan Cohen also inhabit the role with Didier Flamand being the one closest to the “real” Dalí’s approximate age.
However, it doesn’t particularly matter which Dalí is being Dalí for they are all him and none of him are him. They are a set of gestures we know as Dalí. When the artist becomes aware that Judith is not going to film the interview he leaves – the great Dalí has no time for print when HE is the art. Judith believes all is lost until a producer Jérôme (Romain Duris) promises her and Dalí a full-length documentary feature with “the biggest film camera in the world”.
Dupieux then moves much of the film to Port Lligat – or a facsimile of Dalí’s famous home which is detailed enough to pass for the original, egg sculptures and all. Dalí is painting “from life”, one of his detailed selections of his unconscious using local villagers as models – including one wearing a prosthetic stretched head. The woman from earlier, now his maid Lucie, brings him a telephone saying he has a call, but the cord doesn’t stretch that far so Dalí must go through a tunnel back to his home to answer it (“This is bullshit” one of his models dressed as a rock proclaims). While on the telephone to Judith, Dalí seems himself as elderly Dalí and asks Lucie “How old am I?” No one seems to know, and he decides it was a hallucination.
He attends a dinner organised by his gardener Georges (Laurent Nicolas) attended by his wife Gala (Catherine Schaub-Abkarian) and the local Catholic priest Father Jacques (Éric Naggar) who regales him with a seemingly unending story of a dream he had. Over a stew which included maggots and soil (disgusting but researched from Dalí’s own diaries) the priest tells him of a narrative that involves him going to hell, being shot by a cowboy, ending up on a boat, and more as the film keeps returning to the dinner to explain what the audience has just seen.
Prophetic newspapers, discussions of bowel movements, car crashes, Dalí painting Gala as a younger man but Gala remaining the same age, interviews on television where the artist claims he is “an anarchist and a monarchist,” plus several visual references to Dalí’s paintings whirl around. A fake painting is sold at auction. Dalí jiggles the breasts of a make-up artist who isn’t paying attention to his barrage of Dalísms (he leaves in a huff), a documentary exists where no documentary was filmed.
For all Dupieux’s deliberate weirdness and discombobulating “happenings” his ‘surreal’ version of the surrealist is filled with real life references to the public persona Dalí constructed as ‘the only living artist.’ Dalí’s famously outré personality is captured by each of the actors playing him, with a note of melancholy for the elderly artist living alone unnoticed by the world. Quentin Dupieux knows a lot about Dalí – enough that anyone who has some biographical understanding of the man will appreciate. He also knows that there is no definite manner in which any artist can hope to tell Dalí’s story as Dalí himself changed it too often.
Daaaaaalí! is fantastically clever, uncovering the celebrity Dalí and the industry of celebrity that surrounded him. Salvador Dalí was a trickster, a fake, a man with no scruples (he was happy to support Franco enough to stay in Spain), a man for whom the dollar beckoned, and a magnificent painter. He was funny, outrageous, petty, a mess of neuroses, and a chronicler of a libidinous and cultural unconsciousness. He was also a man with a silly moustache who wrote down his every bowel movement.
Quentin Dupieux’s Daaaaaalí! is a glorious oddity but also sincere in its appreciation for the mercurial madman at its centre. A film where nothing is real, so everything is true – and that’s the Dalí genius.
Daaaaaalí is playing tomorrow at the Sydney Underground Film Festival.
