The phantom of Buñuel in that obscure object of desire, Daaaaaalí!

Daaaaaalí! is a strange film and that is to be expected. It is a film about the Spanish surrealist after all, but it is not strange because—or at least, not only because—of its subject.

Daaaaaalí! is directed by the electronic musician and DJ turned director, Quentin Dupieux, who established a deserved cult following with his 2010 film, Rubber. For those unfamiliar with Dupieux’s filmography, Rubber is about a sentient tire that has telekinetic powers and develops a penchant for exploding heads. While not his first film, Rubber left its mark—if one excuses the word play—splattering the way for even stranger films to follow. Another notable work is his 2019 film Deerskin about a man besotted with his deerskin jacket who proves his fidelity by destroying other jackets. In comparison, the still-very-odd Daaaaaalí! seems mild and restrained. What is so strange about the film is that it is not even weirder, not more excessive given its material and simultaneously arty but schlocky auteur [a filmmaker with a distinctive authorial style] at the helm. But of course, it remains quirky, replete with Dupieux’s usual reflexes toward inexplicable, absurd(ist) occurrences combined with temporal uncertainty / displacement. Fittingly, this gem screened at the Sydney Underground Film Festival, which is dedicated to screening the unusual and experimental, which I know firsthand from my own experiences and involvement with the festival.

While Dupieux’s works are so delightfully and defiantly odd as to be inimitable, his recent effort, Yannick, 2023—in which an audience member holds a theatre hostage and forces his own rewrites / composition on the players—proves Dupieux adept at more conventional narrative cinema. In light of this, Daaaaaalí! seems a return to form. The film’s very title gestures to this referentiality and may partially allude to the ostentatious, theatrical (read, pretentious and pompous) way that Dalí would pronounce his name in the third person, rendering the syllables more elongated than his clocks. Indeed, in an interview with Mubi the director underscores the care he took to get the dialogue sounding like Dalí. However, the A’s more overtly refer to the different actors who play Dalí: Edouard Baer, Jonathan Cohen, Gilles Lellouche, Pio Marmaï, Didier Flamand, Boris Gillot. Although the device of using multiple actors playing “one” character is not novel—think Todd Solondz’s Palindromes, 2004, or Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, 2009, the decision most strongly recalls Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, 2007, with six actors representing aspects of Bob Dylan’s persona and Buñuel’s final film, That Obscure Object of Desire, 1977, where two actresses play a single character. While Gala (Catherine Schaub Abkarian) appears, Buñuel is both absent and omnipresent, as there are various allusions to Buñuel’s works, including his collaborations with Dalí on Un Chien Andalou, 1929 and L’Age d’Or, 1930.

It is a challenge to sum up the plot. As Variety’s Jessica Kiang notes in her review, Daaaaaalí! has “maybe three beginnings, six middles and four or five endings, none of them coming where they’re supposed to, all of them landing in the right place.” Meanwhile, artnet’s Min Chen queries, “What even is Daaaaaalí!? Is it a biopic of Salvador Dalí? A portrait? An homage or a meta-narrative? A dream? Maybe it’s not any of those things, or all of them at once.” Dupieux, who marries experimentation with campy bad taste, certainly delights in playing with surrealist tropes and conventions, including on the level of narrative “progression”—the film opens in a desert with a piano spouting a stream of water, emulating, unsuccessfully, Dalí’s haunting, humorous, evocative, and provocative Fontaine nécrophilique coulant d’un piano à queue (Necrophilic Fountain Flowing from a Grand Piano), 1932. It’s a fun opening but it doesn’t equal the Dalí masterpiece. But, in defence of the inclusion, it gets the job done of transporting us away from expectations that this will be a biopic.

The film commences its intentionally discombobulated plot with Dalí walking down an impossibly and humorously long hotel corridor—which almost serves as a metaphor for the film as we never know when or if we will ever get to a narrative destination but we nevertheless enjoy the journey. Dalí finally arrives at the hotel room of his would-be-interviewer, Judith (Anaïs Demoustier). However, Dalí refuses to proceed with the interview when he realises it will not be filmed. Judith then is coaxed into promising a filmed interview with Dalí by her producer and financier, though the interview never goes as planned amid sprawling, alternative narrative timelines.

In a way, the film offers a substantial meditation on sensationalism and the media. Dalí has become a canonical figure within surrealism and the history of art. While Dalí is often compared to Renaissance artists, in skill and vision, this elevation of Dalí to the status of serious artist is more recent than one might imagine. Dalí was expelled by the surrealists and loathed by the Left. He betrayed the memory of his friend and would-be paramour Federico García Lorca when he became a vocal defender of Franco. Lorca had been brutally murdered by fascist forces. Dalí also described having an aesthetic and even sexual attraction to Hitler. His art had its critics too. George Orwell (himself posthumously cancelled only recently by Anna Funder) disparaged Dalí’s subject matter, referring to his works as “aberrations” created by a man who possesses “a gift for drawing and an atrocious egoism.” Orwell opined that “Dalí’s fantasies probably cast useful light on the decay of capitalist civilisation. But what he clearly needs is diagnosis. The question is not so much what he is as why he is like that.” Infamously post-Orwell’s rebuke, blank pages with Dalí’s signature were uncovered. (This is alluded to in the film as Dalí shameless puts his own signature on a painting he did not paint.) Dalí signed the blank pages to speed up the printmaking and therefore profit-making process, but rumours spread and accounts vary. The discovery called into question the veracity of many of “Dalí’s” prints, and it has been claimed that Dalí is the most forged artist. But of course, Dalí was so affected, so over the top, that it is perverse to talk of authenticity, as evidenced by his various appearances in commercials, including a risqué commercial where he decorated or defaced a model’s body, amid a proclamation that “Alka-Seltzer is a work of art . . . truly one of a kind like Dalí.”

Perhaps unintended, the choice to use multiple actors to portray Dalí intimates that there is nothing behind Dalí beyond iconic affected poses. At one point in the film, Dalí proclaims that “What towers above all of Dalí’s achievements is Dalí’s personality. Dalí Personage is far superior to Dalí Philosopher, Dalí Metaphysician, Dalí Painter. It’s fair to say that.” (I disagree with such an assessment as the art at its best transcends Dalí’s abhorrent personality.) Dupieux captures this Warholesque dimension of fame-chasing (even if Warhol’s own voice was contrastingly affectless), almost positioning Dalí as an anticipation of Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst. It is fitting that Dupieux has Dalí fixate on the promise of the camera, as the camera at once doubled and flattened the world, severing the visage from an individual while at the same time robbing reality of its layers by turning everything into an image. Cinema has forever deprived time of linearity even as Hollywood insists on shackling cinema to tedious narrative formulas, leaving it to the internet to plunge us into a delirious post-truth vertigo that was always the latent potential of the moving image. Although not directly about the internet and indeed, set before the internet, the film captures through a kind of anamorphosis our period of deepfakes, conspiracy theories, and online confusion—a state of absurdity that Dupieux would seem to welcome. Given our present, perhaps we are all lost in the kind of confused, contextless deserts that form the backdrop to many a Dalí painting.

On that note, Dupieux who is sometimes described as a low surrealist or a pop surrealist, tends to exhibit a bizarre, almost gloopy temporality in all of his films that puts one in mind of Dalí’s Camembert clocks. His films are typically shorter than most feature films, rarely running to ninety minutes. As such, they feel as though they could be extended short films—as with short films, his work centres on the premise. At the same time, he resists fleshing out the characters and so the films feel as though they could (but not should) either be truncated further or fleshed-out more. However, rather than this durational, let’s call it, equivocation, counting against the films, they lend the movies a pleasing disorientation that only heightens the surreality.

Cinema, as psychoanalytic cultural theorist, Barbara Creed once remarked, was born around the same time as psychoanalysis and, as she also notes, the surrealists were enamoured by the apparatus’ ability to use slow motion and reverse motion. In a wonderfully grotesque dinner scene, Dalí consumes maggoty meat but in reverse motion, creating an almost supernatural aura around Dalí. But Dalí is not a demigod as he too is baffled by his doppelgangers and temporal disruptions. Indeed, borrowing Buñuel’s innovation of multiple awakenings within a dream within another dream from The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1971, Dupieux crafts an uncertain reality that would be analogous to jet lag were it not so enjoyable.

For me, the use of surrealist motifs, while effective, renders the film less surreal since such tropes become decidedly referential rather than a transgressive expression of the unconscious, but this is not a criticism of the film. Instead, this serves the subject matter well: both because the film does not seek to compete with Dalí, but also because it offers us the chance to consider surrealism and its most popular figure. All the while, the film captures a tonality similar to Buñuel’s almost slapstick, The Phantom of Liberty, 1974.

In this way, it is tempting to interpret the film as being as much a comment on the director as on the surrealist painter. While Dupieux cinematographically enjoys, perhaps in a lampooning manner, the figure of Dalí, he effectively esteems Buñuel through the film’s homages and quirky sensibility—like Buñuel, he too collaborates with Dalí, although in this case, a Dalí of his own construction through a brilliant, zany cinematic resurrection. If Dalí was as soulless as his critics maintained, then perhaps it is Buñuel who animates this portrayal.

Acknowledgement: I saw Daaaaaalí! as part of the Sydney Underground Film Festival which ran from 12 – 15 September 2024. In the past I have served as the director and coordinator of the festival’s Inhuman Screens Conference. Moreover, this iteration of the festival included my short films in their lineup.

This review was originally published in Artist Profile, issue 69