‘Daaaaaalí!’ Review: Quentin Dupieux Pays Homage to One of the 20th Century’s Kookiest Personalities

Music Box Films

French filmmaker/musician Quentin Dupieux may bristle upon hearing his work described as Surrealistic, but as his productive career continues to develop (six movies in the past four years alone), it becomes increasingly challenging to separate his unique vision from the early 20th-century Surrealist movement through its quirky and unpredictable detours from traditional cinema. From killer tires to superheroes who imbibe their mighty powers from cigarette ingredients, Dupieux's filmography hinges upon outlandish narratives and characters, through which he often explores the nature of performance with his signature off-kilter humor. His latest project, Daaaaaalí! –– which hits theaters across the United States on Friday, October 4 –– feels tailor-made for Dupieux. A kooky biopic in the loosest sense of the word that constructs a portrait of Salvador Dalí, one of history's most well-known Surrealists and artistic personalities, Daaaaaalí! fits perfectly into Dupieux's cinematic universe while paying homage to the creative voices who inspire his work most.

Daaaaaalí! opens with a splendidly composed scene: in an expansive desertscape, water spouts from a piano with a tree growing out of the top, a recreation of Dali's 1933 painting, Necrophilic Fountain Flowing from a Grand Piano, a preparatory image that sets the audience up with what is to come over the next 87 minutes of the film's runtime. From there, we meet a young journalist on the rise, Judith (Anaïs Demoustier in her fourth collaboration with Dupieux), whose latest assignment is a coveted written interview with Dalí. We first spot the iconic artist approaching down a hotel hallway, which hilariously seems to grow longer the farther he walks. Judith seems prepared for the interview, but upon meeting the larger-than-life Dalí, she realizes this gig will be much more complicated than she ever anticipated. As Judith learns to navigate Dalí's ever-shifting personalities and spirits, her assignment blooms into a much grander project than she initially thought, morphing together her dreams and reality in the spirit of the illusive artist she cannot pin down. 

Audiences will sadly be mistaken to assume Daaaaaalí! is a straight-shooting Hollywood biopic. Dupieux casts five actors in the role of the titular character (including Édouard Baer, Didier Flamand, and Gilles Lellouche), bouncing back and forth between his performers with little linear rhyme or reason. This approach reinforces the director’s assertions concerning the impossibility of truly capturing such a complex historical figure, as well as contributing an irreverence that works within Dupieux’s rule-breaking oeuvre. Faithful to the artist’s genuine persona, Dupieux’s vision of Dalí is ever-shifting and always entertaining.

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Many cinephiles are well aware of the creative collaborations between Dalí and fellow Spaniard Luis Buñuel—particularly thanks to 1929’s Un Chien Andalou, arguably the most celebrated short film of all time—and this relation is reincarnated through Daaaaaali!’s sensibilities in many ways. Dream theory served as a foundation for much of Dalí and Buñuel’s work, both together and separately, a theme that Dupieux continues to revisit time and time again, most directly in Daaaaalí!. While the movie’s central narrative objective is Judith’s pursuit of this flawless interview with Dalí, the director’s screenplay constantly pulls the rug out from under our understanding of the reality of the characters, oscillating between the conscious and unconscious with a disorienting sense of humor that only Dupieux can pull off. 

While Dupieux's portrait of Dalí rebels against conventions often found in biopics, the movie's overall concept pays tribute to the eccentric spirit that has come to define Dalí's legacy. Beyond the signature cartoonish mustache and the comically drawn-out rolled r's, the director's interpretation of the artist acutely taps into the pomp and pageantry Dalí so carefully built into his public persona. In many ways, this sketch presents Dalí as a dictionary caricature of an artist, an overblown figure lost in their own creative process. Dupieux pays particular attention to ego and its inextricable connection to the creative process in celebration of Dalí's extroverted nature. At times, Daaaaalí! chooses not to shy away from its subject's less-desirable features, including a bougie aristocratic attitude that led the artist to support facets of the Francoist dictatorship, which consequently led to the disillusionment of his friendship with Buñuel and excommunication from the Surrealist movement. The film's screenplay pokes fun at this elitist mindset through laughable lines like, "I'm jaded by flat water."

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Also known for his career making electronic music under the alias Mr. Oizo, Dupieux's explorations of the interconnection of media and art culminate in Daaaaalí! in similar practices to his other films. The movie follows written interviews that transform into full-scale documentaries, nested projects within projects tied together through the dreams and illusions built by the director. This tent pole of Dupieux's innovative vision helps to expand our ideas of what movie-making can evoke, a fascinating concept within the increasingly unsteady landscape of contemporary cinema at a crossroads.

Love them or hate them, Dupieux's films are bizarre, engaging, and memorable, particularly when considering how quickly he can impressively produce them as writer/director/cinematographer/editor. Daaaaalí! is no exception, standing out as one of the French creative's most accomplished works. Daaaaalí! operates with its own rules, presenting a "non-biopic biopic" of Salvador Dalí embedded with Dupieux's reverence for some of his artistic icons, riotously quirky from start to finish.

3.5/5

‘Daaaaaali!’ made its world premiere out of competition at the 2023 Venice Film Festival. Music Box Films handles the U.S. distribution of the film, with a theatrical release beginning on Friday, October 4. Click here for more information about ‘Daaaaaali!’