Daaaaaali!

A young journalist (Anais Demoustler: The Count of Monte Cristo) wants to do an interview and a documentary, meeting the iconic artist on several occasions, played by five actors (Edouard Baer, Jonathan Cohen, Gilles Lellouche, Pio Marmai, Didier Flamand .

Two authors of the irrational, Dali and Quentin Dupieux, come together in this delirious and intelligent portrait of the master of surrealism, full of imagination, fantasy, and creative freedom. This is not a film about Dali, but with Dali. Here, Dali multiplies himself in a peculiar reinterpretation of his figure; he is free and caricature-like, he escapes, he finds himself with his aging other self. And the simple plot focuses on a French journalist meets the iconic surrealist artist Salvador Dalí on several occasions for a documentary project that never came to be. Turning out to be a hilarious and unpredictable Dali, it is Dali in his most essential form.

The film has brief biographic remarks, and of course his wife Gala appears in short scenes while he is painting, but no his friends Federíco Garcia Lorca and Luís Buñuel, in fact Quentin didn't want to make a proper biopic of the painter, as he felt it would make no sense.

There are some Dalí paintings brought to life. So 3 famous Dalí paintings are re-enacted in the film as tableaux vivants: "Necrophilic Fountain Flowing from a Grand Piano" (1932), "The Average Fine and Invisible Harp" (1932), and the anachronistic "Dali from the Back Painting Gala from the Back Eternalized by Six Virtual Corneas Provisionally Reflected in Six Real Mirrors" (1972 - 1973).

In this regard, director Quentin Dupieux explains: "Dalí's greatest masterpiece according to Dupieux was his extravagant personality; with this film, I tried to imagine a dialogue between cinema and image. I don't have Dali's genius, so, in all modesty, the film is an attempt to pay him the craziest and most free homage possible¨.

This absurd motion picture was mediocrely directed by Quentin Dupieux . He has directed varios outlandish films as Incredible But True (2022). And Smoking causes coughing (2022) premiered at the midnight section of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. After Quentin has made some bizarre, offbeat films, getting some french hits. He has directed: Le Daim or Deerskin (United States, English title) (2010), Au poste (2018), Mandibules (2020), Yannick (2023), and its most succesful film was Rubber (2010). Rating: 5.5/10. Only advisable for fans of strange and surreal films.

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."

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.

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.

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.