How to begin a film about Salvator Dali?

With a typically Magrittian image: a piano that is a fountain.

So "this is not a piano."

A former pharmacist now converted to journalism wants to interview the great painter.

They make an appointment in the suite of a large hotel and the artist reaches the piano and starts walking down the hallway complaining about the hotel, they manage to order Perrier water as Dali drinks a lot of water and especially sparkling, while the artist still walks down a hallway that seems infinitely long and keeps talking and complaining as was his usual paranoid-critical style.

Once he arrives, they sit down and he notices that there is no camera therefore he gets up and leaves.

He is invited to dinner by a monsignor who wants to tell him about a dream that continues until the end of the film, interspersed with other attempts that the journalist makes to interview him by submitting to him the possibility of making a film with the largest cinematic video cameras that the market offers.

The artist accepts and shows up on a beach where he intends to drive to the set in his Rolls Royce, a rather arduous feat for the driver and Dali decides to drive by destroying the video camera that had been placed there. Yet another failed attempt. But the monsignor's dream continues until he is killed by a cowboy and a painting with this scene is sold at an auction for 10 million euros but it is a fake Dali.

Each time the scene changes the actor playing the artist also changes: it seems obvious that to play this role of an egocentric, narcissistic, individualistic, centralizing, vain one actor is not enough, the ego bursts out and requires more people to describe it.

Hilarious is the scene where Dali shoots birds, and when his phone is brought to him with the cord disconnected, while the bartender-faced journalist lives in the dream of becoming famous while becoming an actress.

Narcissism but above all dreaming is the focal point of the film; after all, the famous painter's art, like Dupieux's, is free of all technicality and classicism and introduces the unconscious, dream and madness into his artistic creations.

An outsized ego sextuples the a's of his name, increases the actors to fill the role, stretches the corridor infinitely and multiplies the final scene at will.

In short, an artistic delirium Dupieux's meets and collides with the eccentric and egocentric madness of the Spanish artist.

If the rejection of logic is the focal point of surrealism: what could be more surreal and less logical than the cinema of Questin Dupieux? What more apt artistic subject than Dali?

However, the French director's cinema responds to the surreal logic of the illogical and absurd, so it is still logic. Chapeau!

08-Sep-2023 by Beatrice