Last Updated on October 18, 2024, 10:48 PM | Published: October 15, 2024
How do you make a film about superstar surrealist Salvador Dali?
Do you reduce his boisterous and blindingly colorful life down into a simple biographical summary of facts and moments?
Do you attempt to recount his life through a style or approach reverently akin to the impenetrably surrealist imagery he painted?
Do you commit to the mystery and persona surrounding his life and his mind and instead tell his story at arm’s length through the eyes of someone in his orbit?
Well, if you’re French director/musician/wacko experimenter Quentin Dupieux, the only reasonable answer is to drop all three approaches into a blender with a dash of Charlie Kaufmann and a big heaping dollop of Monty Python to serve up a work that actually – against all odds – feels like Dali.
The result is “Daaaaaali!” (that’s six “a”s and an exclamation point for anyone keeping track,) a mind-bending, time-warping pseudo-study in dream logic that delves less into who Dali was and more into how Dali wanted to be seen by the world.
It’s a riotous, brilliantly ridiculous, and shockingly concise filmic fever dream that OKC audiences can descend into themselves when it screens this weekend, October 18th through 20th, at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art’s Sam Noble Theater.
The plot (if indeed there even is a plot) centers on a French journalist and aspiring documentarian in (maybe) the 1970s as she attempts to create a comprehensive article or film or something exploring the life and work of Dali in his own words.
As the project is repeatedly derailed by Dali’s insufferable ego and nonsensical demands, so too are our protagonist’s mind and the entire cinematic offering before us derailed into an increasingly abstract and unrelentingly dreamlike anti-narrative.
You see, surrealism was never about simple abstraction or randomness. It was always about dreams, about their indecipherable meanings and images and their cascading, indefinable logic.
If Dali had a singular goal or intention behind a majority of his works – and that’s admittedly still an “if” – then it was surely to explore and attempt to capture the dream state, to depict the naked psyche in the way that it demands to be seen, unburdened by reality.
What “Daaaaaali!” offers, then, is an attempt to turn that same intention back onto Dali himself, to present his vision and his persona in the way that he’d like to be seen, equally unburdened by the pesky reason and reality that he so adamantly disavowed.
In that way, actors morph, times and settings change, continuity becomes meaningless, dreams are explained and memories recounted only to continually find themselves still in the dream or still living the memory.
Dali himself is portrayed by at least six different actors throughout, switching out randomly mid-scene, often shot-to-shot, with no concern paid to sense, to chronology, or to explanation, all worthless constructs for which Dali had no interest.
It would all be exhaustingly challenging, even mind-rattling, if not for how irreverently hilarious the film is.
Let’s not forget this is the same writer/director that gave us “Rubber,” a bloody, mind-blowing horror film about a killer car tire.
Dupieux smartly keeps his portrait of Dali anchored in absurdist comedy, openly refuting any attempt at seriousness and defying even its own detours into pretentiousness by ripping the rug out from under every earnest moment and repeatedly burning the house down around the audience’s expectations.
Every single time you think you’ve arrived safely back in reality or chronology or anything resembling a straightforward narrative, you’re wrong.
And still, even willfully untethered from the real world or from any real history of Dali’s life, this still feels like the only conceivable way to construct a biopic around the man.
As one of the many films-within-the-film tells us, Dupieux believes that Dali’s greatest work of art was himself and his own larger-than-life, ceaselessly performative persona, living each moment purely to uphold the character he’d created for the public.
Was he really such a self-obsessed egomaniac, or was he only putting that on to feed the masses and stoke interest in his work?
Did he even actually act that way in public during his life at all, or has his demanding, irrational cockiness been wildly exaggerated only since his death to reinforce the narrative he designed?
Any realistic answer to these questions wouldn’t be good enough.
The “real” man and the “real” life behind the construction that was Salvador Dali don’t matter. The image of the man, unbound by reality, by time, and even by reason is the only thing that matters.
That’s the way he wanted it.
It’s honestly easy to believe that if Dali himself had written and created an autobiographical film of his own life, that it would be indistinguishable from Dupieux’s film here.
It’s pure superego, cracking open the mind and the dream state to explore the ways in which we perceive ourselves being perceived.
So is the whole movie just Dali’s own dream of himself? Is it the dream of the journalist imagining a report on the great surrealist? Maybe it’s just Dupieux’s own dream of a Dali biopic as if it had existed already.
There’s absolutely no way to know, and that’s exactly what makes this film purely, gorgeously, hysterically, and overwhelmingly joyfully “Dali!”
“Daaaaaali!” screens Friday, October 18th through Sunday, October 20th at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.
For showtimes, tickets, and more, visit okcmoa.com.
Catch Brett Fieldcamp’s film column weekly for information and insights into the world of film in the Oklahoma City metro and Oklahoma. | Brought to you by the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.
Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.