A film by Quentin Dupieux
With: Édouard Baer, Pio Marmaï, Gilles Lellouche, Anaïs Demoustier, Pierre Niney, Jonathan Cohen, Alain Chabat, Didier Flamand, Jérôme Niel, Hakim Jemili
A French journalist meets Salvador Dali several times for a documentary project.
Our rate: ***
With Daaaaaali!, Quentin Dupieux presents us with a concept film, strongly inspired by its subject – Dali, surrealism, and the mise en abîme that the Spanish painter constantly explored, for their confounding and reflective value. Dali, beyond being a hyper-creative painter of genius, was also an out-of-place character, constantly playing with his image, and never afraid of appearing whimsical, taking the media as a playground, where he took malicious pleasure in constructing an unparalleled, humorous image. In a way, Dupieux pays homage to the Hispanic master, to his art, but also to the character himself, with a film in which jokes and even farce know no bounds. Dali is everywhere, represented with varying degrees of mimicry and charisma (annoying Cohen, credible Baer, weak Lellouche or Niney, for example), in every shot, and his art is not to be outdone. Dupieux draws his inspiration from paintings, documentaries on the character and more or less well-known visuals, and blends it all into his usual zany script, where the absurd reigns supreme. Anais Demoustier also seems to enjoy this total blurring of reference points, where all dimensions become cyclical and infinite, time and space alike, in a role perfectly suited to the overflowing, positive energy she exudes in so many of her performances. While it’s regrettable that some actors are lazier than others in their composition, and that it’s sometimes too easy to repeat a motif almost ad infinitum (where many others would have stopped at the first iteration), the quasi-mathematical concept (a sequence, one might say) on which Dupieux bases Daaaaaali! has an effect, making us laugh, and even think (perhaps not as much as a Dali painting), much more so than when Dupieux indulges in childish jokes (Fumer fait tousser!, for example). After Yannick, which lacked the inspiration and freshness to quickly get stuck in its original idea, Dupieux is now seen as a director in the making, lacking only a few things (technique) to gain notoriety and respectability. In any case, his relatively uneven filmography is enriched by a film that is ambitious, funny, relatively well-paced, and far less empty than some of his other achievements.