Daaaaaali! (2023)
- Reviewed from the 2023 Venice International Film Festival
In terms of artistic output, Quentin Dupieux isn’t quite challenging Miike Takashi, the Japanese director who frequently clocks in at four features a year, but he’s going at a fair snip. Daaaaaali! is his second film (so far) this year; he made two other films also in 2022. But there’s nothing slapdash about the end product. The prolific French filmmaker – who also has a successful career as a DJ and electronic musician under the name Mr. Oizo – has produced some of the tightest, best-scripted and most original work in the last few years. Whether it’s the adventures of a suede jacket enthusiast in Deerskin (2019) or a pair of losers trying to monetise a giant fly in Mandibles (2021), Dupieux’s vision is entirely unique – he writes, directs, serves as his own editor and cinematographer and until recently also provided his own soundtrack – but each film is also its own beast, or giant fly. His most recent film – which premiered at Locarno Film Festival in August this year (a mere month ago) – Yannick is a chamber piece, taking place entirely in a Parisian theatre as an audience member interrupts a farce and holds the actors hostage until he rewrites the play to his own satisfaction.
More varied and complex, Daaaaaali! moves in a kind of perfect (dis)comfort zone for Dupieux. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect fit than Dalí, the Spanish provocateur and surrealist, for Dupieux. After all, Dalí also toyed with multimedia (working in cinema as well as art), he lived his alter ego as his main ego and confounded the restraint of how things are supposed to be done, in the art world and society in general.
A journalist Anaïs Demoustier seeks to conduct an interview with famed artist Salvador Dalí, played by Édouard Baer, Jonathan Cohen, Gilles Lellouche, Pio Marmaï, and Didier Flamand, hence the extra “a”s of the title. The multiple actors cast as a single character is a trick to capture the multifaceted figure reminiscent of Todd Haynes’s Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There (2007), but here the subject is slippier and more apt to escape any kind of representation beyond his own grandiose self-caricature. An endless hotel corridor, the absence of a camera crew, the size of the cameras, the time it takes for the cameras to be set up, anything and everything foils the journalist as she tries to set up the interview and Dalí seeks to evade it, delaying and frustrating any forward momentum, like a Rolls Royce driving through deep sand. Dreams become digressions, distractions, revealing and hiding and then go back to being dreams again. Jokes become dreams as well. Everything is a joke, a dream, a distraction, an illusion, utterly serious, totally meaningless and that meaninglessness is profound, that facetiousness is totally serious. Or not. It’s as if Luis Buñuel was directing a script by Monty Python.
In the midst of the carefully curated madness, two paintings from 1932 are lovingly recreated as tableaux: ’Necrophilic Fountain Flowing from a Grand Piano’ and ‘The Fine and Average Invisible Harp’. Models stand around hoping to take a break, unclear what the surrealist is producing. A dinner at a friend’s house leads to the recounting of an endless dream which, given the strangeness of the film’s own narrative, might never end. We might still be in it, for all I know. Dalí himself doesn’t really change from one actor to another except in look and age – his pitchfork moustache points give his face a capital W pointing to his own mad stage-hypnotist’s eyes.
As for the journalist, she finds herself pressured to get the story, first of all by Dalí with his endless demands and then by an editor (Romain Duris), who has some sexist advice for her in how to get ahead. Nothing – except its own unpredictability – is predictable in the film, and it is surely not going to be everyone’s cup of lobsters but that is not its aim. Dupieux shares with his subject an obstinacy to forge ahead and in so doing attains a silliness that becomes dangerously close to the sublime.