Daaaaaali!

Daaaaaali! moves in a kind of perfect (dis)comfort zone for Dupieux. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect fit than Dalí, the Spanish provocateur and surrealist, for Dupieux. After all, Dalí also toyed with multimedia (working in cinema as well as art), he lived his alter ego as his main ego and confounded the restraint of how things are supposed to be done, in the art world and society in general.

A journalist Anaïs Demoustier seeks to conduct an interview with famed artist Salvador Dalí, played by Édouard Baer, Jonathan Cohen, Gilles Lellouche, Pio Marmaï, and Didier Flamand, hence the extra “a”s of the title. The multiple actors cast as a single character is a trick to capture the multifaceted figure reminiscent of Todd Haynes’s Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There (2007), but here the subject is slippier and more apt to escape any kind of representation beyond his own grandiose self-caricature.

John Bleasdale / Sight and Sound