2023-09-08 14:15:37
Quentin Dupieux he has made films about killer tires, about giant flies trained to rob banks and about homes that house time-travel machines; one of the characters in the one that opens commercially in Spain tomorrow, Smoking causes coughing, is a fish that talks while it is being cooked. His cinema exemplifies the surrealism at a time when the abuse of the term has made him lose much of its meaning, and so it was only a matter of time before he used it to approach the myth and mystique surrounding the figure of Salvador Dalí, and that the resulting film was as unclassifiable and inexplicable as the one he presented yesterday out of competition at the Mostra.
Daaaaaaali, dit in another way, it has nothing to do with a biopic in use. It could be said that his look at the genius of Figueres resembles the polyhedral portrait that I’m not there (2007) made Bob Dylan if the film by Todd Haynes, yes, to a large extent had taken the musician as a joke. The painter is played by five different actors – or is it six? – and sometimes several of these different versions of the character appear in the same scene or even in the same shot.
Ostensibly set in the early 1980s, on paper the film is about successive unsuccessful attempts to interview the genius by an inexperienced reporter, but while reasonably accurate, it mostly serves to give Dupieux the necessary space to try structural watermarks -during much of the footage, the action takes place within a dream which is within another dream which in turn is within another- and vindicate himself as an implacable activist of the absurd. Meanwhile, he fills the film both with references to Dalí’s paintings – the opening shot is a recreation of the work Necrophilic Fountain springing from a grand piano – and with visual and thematic nods to the cinema of his friend and collaborator Luis Buñuel.
His way of speaking
“My source of inspiration has been the media figure, the television appearances that Dalí made in the 80s and thanks to which I discovered the personality and the way of speaking of the character before his work”, he to explain Dupieux in front of the press, and his words explain that the string of moments of precise humor that make up Daaaaaalí allude to the way the master speaks, in a French with a Catalan accent as thick as tova, or to his meaning of the show and its vanity. In one scene of the film, Dalí defines himself as “the only living artist in this small and miserable world”; in another, he claims that the best boxer in history should have paid him royalties to use his surname because, after all, he was called “Mohame… Dalí”. Surrealism, then.
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