Some clichés are at play in the wise anti-biographical film “Daaaaaalí!”, a nose-twisting comedy about the impossibility of telling a conventional story about the renowned Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí. First comes the hardest and perhaps most irresistible truism: Dalí, like many other artists and public figures, was his greatest creation. Of course, but so what?
“Daaaaaaali!” it uses every other cliché lightly throughout its 70-plus minute running time, which primarily follows the artist, here played by several actors, as he is harassed by a persistent French journalist. He (several) continually agrees to be interviewed by the eager reporter Judith (Anaïs Demoustier). But then he changes his mind, which tends to ramble. Likewise, writer-director Quentin Dupieux (“Yannick”) follows his typically itinerant muse on a circuit around Dalí’s titanic ego.
“Daaaaaaali!” challenges viewers to keep going as the plot loops back on itself through dreams within dreams and morbid interludes that only sometimes include scenes of Dalí speaking or even working on his art. The film begins in a hotel. Dalí (Édouard Baer) crosses the hallway to meet Judith. As he walks, he makes inane pronouncements about the building’s hideous architecture. He points at everything and nothing with his staff and it takes forever to arrive, like Lancelot’s Möbius charge in the swamp castle in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” Not only does the building not meet Dalí’s standards, but also the conditions for the interview. Sparkling water? No, no, flat. One hour? It better be 15 minutes. Finally, the interview stops before it begins; no cameras are filming Dalí and apparently that is a deciding factor.
Judith spends the rest of the film trying to track down Dalí, although at times it seems like the universe (or Dalí’s imagination) keeps placing her in his path. Disturbing dreams and morbid omens suggest that perhaps Dalí should talk to Judith. He really disagrees, not for long. Some symbols seem as obvious as the time-worn images that have come to replace Dalí’s work over the years. Sometimes a priest (Éric Naggar) describes a dream involving a murderous cowboy, an impromptu trip to hell, and a camel ride through the desert. Dalí (Gilles Lellouche) zooms out the entire scene with a gesture and walks away in reverse motion, saying “See you soon” through masked audio. Then there is a recurring hallucination of an older, wheelchair-bound Dalí (Didier Flamand) hovering around the terrace of his own seaside bungalow. This also means something, but how could something so literal haunt Dalí so persistently?
Judith’s struggle to attract Dalí also suggests more than it explains about this or any other great artist. She does everything she can think of to sweeten the deal: one, no, two movie cameras, a movie producer (Romain Duris), makeup, a new suit, etc. All of this seems normal and correct to Dalí (Jonathan Cohen and also Pio Marmaï), whose only constant thought is that he is the most important person in any room. It’s Dalí’s world, and Judith simply orbits it, a banal observation that would be much more annoying if Dupieux weren’t so good at overloading our expectations.
In one scene, a shower of toy dogs cascades in front of Dalí’s window. “Call me later,” he mysteriously tells Judith after repeatedly demanding that she stop bothering him. In another scene, Judith’s producer makes unkind suggestions about her appearance while she attempts to stab a meatball with her fork. In both scenes, Dalí’s world seems as small and trite as one might imagine if one thought less about Dalí’s style and more about the Cliffs Notes version of his biography. Universal, on a human scale, sensible: that’s Dalí! Or rather, that’s the recurring joke at the heart of “Daaaaaalí!”
As Dupieux’s cult followers already know, the secret to the success of “Daaaaaalí!” it depends on their cunning ability to lull you into a false sense of security, usually despite your better judgment. It’s not that the jokes he tells are surprising or that his actors do anything so different or captivating that you forget that the rug was pulled out from under you just now, and in a very similar way.
Rather, Dupieux has an eye for composition and a talent for packaging a camera frame. He has a clear eye for dramatic potential, and that has given his recent comedies a wickedly confident style that matches his time-wasting, anticlimactic sense of humor. That suits “Daaaaaaali” well, since it’s basically a Hall of Mirrors that was made to reflect, rather than fully represent, some elusive genius. As a result, the funniest thing about “Daaaaali!” It’s how often Dupieux manages to fool you into thinking he’s about to zig when he’s clearly ready to do so. It’s nothing fancy, but Dupieux’s commitment to illogical anti-humor is still pretty disarming.