‘Daaaaaali!’: Venice Review

Dir/scr: Quentin Dupieux. France. 2023. 79 mins

A latterday Surrealist pays homage to a fabled founding father in Daaaaaali! – but hardly with reverence, nor in a way that owes much to traditional biopic coherence. This knockabout, genially tricky contemplation on the myth and mystique of showman-painter Salvador Dalí is the latest from conceptual farceur Quentin Dupieux. Coming only a month after his Locarno-premiered chamber piece Yannick – and a year after Mary Harron’s biopic Daliland, with Ben Kingsley sporting the waxed whiskers – the latest from French cinema’s prolific one-man band sees Dupieux again writing, shooting and editing, although ‘editing’ understates his plate-spinning feat here.

Less about Dalí himself, more about the difficulty of capturing his mercurial essence

Daaaaaalí! is less about Dalí himself, more about the difficulty of capturing his mercurial essence. Avid Dalinians will want to see how the film treats their idol but, most of all, Dupieux’s own buoyant cult status will give this joyous fantasia some vibrant niche traction.

Set apparently in the early ’80s, the film ostensibly involves the attempts of a journalist, Judith (Dupieux regular Anaïs Demoustier), to interview Surrealism’s extravagant sacred monster. As she explains to camera at the start, she is still finding her feet in her profession, and she waits nervously in a hotel room for the great man to arrive; the appearance of a white goat suggests that what follows won’t be strictly in the realm of the real.

Dalí (Édouard Baer) arrives, a grandiloquent dandy first seen striding along a seemingly endless corridor; but he objects to being interviewed in print, and will only deign to talk in front of a “cinematogrrrraphic camera”. Judith finds a producer, Jérôme (Romain Duris), who encourages her to capture Dalí on film, and she heads south to catch him on his own terrain – where her subject scuppers the shoot by insisting on being chauffeured on the beach in his Rolls Royce.

Dalí’s capricious vanity looks set to capsize Judith’s project. Meanwhile, the artist and his imperiously enigmatic wife Gala (Catherine Schaub Abkarian) are invited to a somewhat grisly dinner by a priest (Eric Naggar) who insists on recounting a banal dream, hoping to squeeze a sellable artwork out of his guest. This is where the film spins off into a delirious and – in Dupieux’s characteristically audience-baiting fashion – deliberately repetitive structure of dream-within-a-film-within-a-story-within-a-digression.

We have been here in cinema before, but that’s the point: Dupieux is cheerfully perpetrating a wholesale forgery of the style of Dalí’s old collaborator Luis Buñuel, notably in his late French period (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty). Just as Buñuel heightened the absurdity of those films’ by adopting the flat tones of bourgeois comedy, Dupieux too takes on a mode of visual deadpan, in which it is the house-of-cards construction rather than outré imagery that keeps us mesmerised – numerous inspired sight gags notwithstanding.

In another Buñuelian touch, Dupieux casts several actors as Dalí: Baer, Jonathan Cohen, Pio Marmaï, Gilles Lellouche and Didier Flamand (as Dalí in old age), all dropping in and out of the role seemingly at random as they play the man at different ages, with different intensities, and with different consonant-mangling riffs on the artist’s legendarily hammy delivery.

Meanwhile Demoustier, who has played a whole range of ingénue variations in Dupieux films, gives one of her most engaging performances to date. She gives Daaaaaali! a baseline of bemused normality as the woman trying to sustain her career and her dignity under a bombardment of grandstanding male ego from both Dalí and Jérôme.

Dupieux plays every trick in the vintage Surrealist box of camera trickery – trompe l’oeil, backwards motion and all. That these devices are second-hand is all part of the fun, chiming with the film’s comic speculation on artistic originality and fakery. Thomas Bangalter, formerly of Daft Punk, contributes a jangling acoustic score designed either to drive you mad through wilful monotony, or get under your skin like the palmful of ants in Un Chien Andalou.