French filmmaker Quentin Dupieux’s new comedy, which opened in the Out of Competition section at the Venice Film Festival last year, comes with a few complications attached. Daaaaaali has six “a” in its title and the titular character of the famous Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dali is played by five different actors though with the trademark moustache intact—Gilles Lellouche, Edouard Baer, Jonathan Cohen, Pio Marmai and Didier Flamand.
As Dupieux himself put it, Dali is too complex a personality for one actor. So, through this multi-actor collaboration, one encounters Dali in all his varied shades of eccentricity with Cohen providing the most flamboyant and mercurial interpretation of the lot.
Dali’s dabbling with cinema is well documented. He collaborated with Luis Bunuel on Un Chien Andalou (1929) and worked with Alfred Hitchcock in Spellbound (1945). Most recently Ben Kingsley played Dali in Mary Harron’s 2022 biopic, Daliland.
However, at the core of the “real fake biopic” or a “declaration of love to Dali” as Dupieux himself refers to Daaaaaali, is a pharmacist turned journalist Judith, played by Anais Demoustier, who is shown meeting Dali on several occasions.
Despite that, she is unable to bring a documentary project on him to fruition, even as Dali keeps running her down as a barista. She has a producer to support her ambitious project but can’t find a way to manage Dali’s ego to make the process easier.
The entire act of the unsuccessful filmmaking within the film makes for a befuddling ride, with the disorientation writ large on Demoustier’s face. After all, there are a bunch of beginnings and innumerable endings to reckon with for the confused viewer. However, the narrative ingenuities, the device of repetition or recurrence, especially the time loop that Dupieux plays with towards the end, ironically also make things equally sprightly and whimsical. While appearing artistically anarchic, Daaaaaali finds its core in the seeming chaos.
Music is as central and crucial to the film as the visuals.
Back in 1949 Carol Reed’s classic film noir The Third Man came riding on a brilliant soundtrack played on the ancient instrument, zither, by composer Anton Karas. Now Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter deploys zither in Daaaaaali to great effect.
It’s tough to put Daaaaaali in any box. There’s something wildly engaging and outright fun about the film. Perhaps it has to do with Dupieux’s playfulness—with his subject, story, narrative treatment, the audience expectations and reactions and filmmaking at large. The film refuses to get weighed down by any lofty artistic aims and assumptions. And it’s this that makes it as surreal as Dali’s paintings themselves. I for one can’t still get over an early sequence in the film of Dali walking, and walking, and walking, and walking for an interview down a never-ending hotel corridor. It had me transfixed with its incessant nothingness.
Dupieux indulges in quite a few such stylistic experiments, absurdities and gags drawn from the world of art, Luis Bunuel’s cinema and Dali’s own mercurial nature and surreal works. Like starting the film off with a cinematic interpretation of one of Dali’s paintings—Necrophilic Fountain Flowing from a Grand Piano (1932). Another of his 1932 works, The Average Fine and Invisible Harp gets Dupieux’s nod. Then there’s the painting of a shootout that lies at the core of the film. Is it the cowboy who shot the priest or did the priest shoot the cowboy in? Daaaaaali keeps the audience guessing about it, and a lot more, all through its crisp and compelling 78 minutes.