A few clichés are at play in the wiseass anti-biopic "Daaaaaalí!," a nose-tweaking comedy about the impossibility of telling a conventional story about the renowned Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí. The hardiest and perhaps most irresistible truism comes first: Dalí, like many other artists and public figures, was his own greatest creation. Of course, but so what?
"Daaaaaalí!" wears every other cliché lightly throughout its 70+-minute runtime, which mostly follows the artist, here played by several actors, as a persistent French journalist hounds him. He (various) continually agrees to be interviewed by the eager-to-please reporter Judith (Anaïs Demoustier). But then he changes his mind, which tends to wander. Likewise, writer/director Quentin Dupieux ("Yannick") follows his typically itinerant muse in a circuit around Dalí's titanic ego.
"Daaaaaalí!" defies viewers to stick with it as the plot doubles back on itself through dreams within dreams and morbid interludes that only sometimes include scenes of Dalí either talking about or even working on his art. The movie begins in a hotel. Dalí (Édouard Baer) crosses the hallway to meet Judith. He makes inane pronouncements about the building's frightful architecture as he walks. He gestures at everything and nothing with his cane and takes an impossibly long time to arrive, like Lancelot's Möbius strip charge on the swamp castle in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." It's not only the building that doesn't meet Dalí's standards but also the conditions for the interview, too. Sparkling water? No, no, flat. An hour? Better make it 15 minutes. Finally, the interview stops before it starts; no cameras are filming Dalí and apparently that's a dealbreaker.
Judith spends the rest of the movie trying to pin down Dalí, though it occasionally seems like the universe—or Dalí's imagination—keeps placing her in his path. Unsettling dreams and morbid portents suggest that maybe Dalí should talk to Judith. He doesn't really agree, not for long. Some symbols appear just as obvious as the time-worn images that have come to stand in for Dalí's work over the years. Sometimes a priest (Éric Naggar) describes a dream involving a killer cowboy, an impromptu trip to Hell, and a camel ride through the desert. Dalí (Gilles Lellouche) waves the whole scene away and walks off in reverse motion, saying "See you soon" through back-masked audio. Then there's a recurring hallucination of an older, wheelchair-bound Dalí (Didier Flamand) flitting about the veranda of his own seaside bungalow. This, too, means something, but how could something so literal hound Dalí so persistently?
Judith's struggle to entice 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 film cameras, a movie producer (Romain Duris), makeup, a new outfit, et cetera. All of this seems normal and right to Dalí (Jonathan Cohen and also Pio Marmaï), whose only constant thought is that he's the most important person in any given room. It's Dalí's world, and Judith's simply orbiting him, a banal observation that would be much more annoying if Dupieux wasn't so good at overloading our expectations.
In one scene, a hail of toy dogs cascades outside Dalí's window. "Call me back later," he mysteriously tells Judith after repeatedly demanding that she stop bothering him. In another scene, Judith's producer makes obnoxious suggestions about her appearance while trying to spear a meatball with his dinner fork. In both scenes, Dalí's world looks as small and as trite as one might imagine if you were thinking less about Dalí's style and more about the Cliffs Notes version of his biography. Universal, human-scaled, sensible—now that's Dalí! Or rather, that's the running joke at the heart of "Daaaaaalí!"
As Dupieux's cult following already knows, the secret to "Daaaaaalí!"'s success hinges on his sneaky knack for lulling you into a false sense of security, usually despite your better judgment. It's not like the jokes that he's telling are surprising or that his actors do anything so different or captivating that you'll forget that they pulled the rug out from you a moment ago and in a very similar way.
Rather, Dupieux has an eye for composition and a talent for packing a camera frame. He has a clear eye for dramatic potential, and that's given his recent comedies a perversely confident style that matches their anti-climactic, time-wasting sense of humor. That suits "Daaaaaalí" fine 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 "Daaaaalí!" is how often Dupieux succeeds at tricking you into thinking that he's about to zig when he's clearly ready to zag. It's not a sophisticated bit, but Dupieux's commitment to illogical anti-humor remains pretty disarming.
