Review of the film by David Pujol “Waiting for Dali”

David Pujol’s film “Waiting for Dali” was released – a gastronomic comedy about the connection between food, art, love and politics. Tells Yulia Shagelman.

The last month in Russian film distribution unexpectedly passes under the sign of Salvador Dali. At the end of May, the biopic “Being Salvador Dali” flashed on the screens, filmed by the director of “American Psycho” Mary Harron. There, the personal and professional battles of the decrepit surrealist with the inevitable passage of time were shown through the eyes of a young and naive admirer. The Catalan director David Pujol, who previously turned to the biography of his great compatriot in two documentaries (“Dali’s Last Masterpiece”, 2015 and “Salvador Dali: In Search of Immortality”, 2018), places the action of his film in the same mid-1970s , which is Harron. But, unlike his American counterpart, he wisely takes Dali away from the center of the stage, turning him more into a part of the landscape surrounding the main characters of the film. And although thoughts about Dali constantly occupy them, and for one of them become a real obsession, the film turns out not about him, but about Spain at the turn of epochs and how this break changes the life of every person, even the most distant from politics and / or art.

So, the year is 1974, the Franco regime and the caudillos themselves have very little left, and the Parisian fashion for street protests has reached Barcelona with a delay of six years. While revolutionary young people are chasing the civil guardsmen with Molotov cocktails, and they are chasing after them with clubs, a struggle is unfolding in a respectable French restaurant: chef Pierre (Bruno Raffaeli) is tired of cooking for high-ranking officials who do not appreciate the refined taste of his dishes and in the heat of political disputes put out cigarettes in plates. The young sushi chef Fernando (Ivan Massage) tries to support the boss, but he insists that it’s time for the assistant himself to leave the restaurant, where he cooks according to other people’s recipes, and try to make something of his own, unlike the others. Even more powerful reason to leave and work, and Barcelona appears in Fernando the next evening, when it turns out that his younger brother Alberto (Paul Lopez) is wanted by the police for setting fire to an administrative building.

The brothers hurriedly leave for coastal Cadaques, where their friend Francois (Nicolas Cazale) lives with his fiancee Lola (Clara Ponso), and her father Jules (Jose Garcia) owns a restaurant in which, due to the unbearable nature of the owner, there is a constant turnover of staff. Here, too, the spirit of the times is already felt: barefoot hippies roam the beaches of Cadaqués, preaching free love, but in general it is still a quiet fishing town, which, however, distinguishes it from hundreds of the same important attraction. After all, Salvador Dali himself (Gal Soler) lives here with his wife Gala (Vicky Peña), and in the mornings he sometimes even arranges performances for amazed tourists on the seashore (the locals are used to everything and no longer pay attention).

Jules’ establishment is not without reason called El Surreal and is decorated in an advising spirit – he is completely obsessed with the idea of ​​getting the artist to himself: this is a crystal dream that should justify all efforts to keep the restaurant afloat. However, Dali ignores all the complex schemes to attract his attention, and Gala, even worse, simply vulgarly demands to pay them money for a visit.

Meanwhile, Fernando, now chef at last, cleans up El Surreal’s kitchen and starts experimenting with local products in the same way that Dali did with colors and images. The topic of high gastronomy is also not alien to David Pujol – he made a documentary series about the famous Catalan chef Ferran Adria and his restaurant El Bulli, marked with three Michelin stars. So everything related to food and cooking looks very convincing in the film, even if Fernando invents molecular cuisine almost 15 years before it actually appeared. And he and his brother manage to fall in love: Fernando with Lola, who now has to choose between him and François, and Alberto with the Russian hippie Lesya (Varvara Borodina) – how the authors brought her to Cadaqués, the authors do not explain, but she also becomes part of another plan to lure Dali into a restaurant.

Toward the end of the picture, Jules will quote a statement attributed to Churchill: “Success is the way from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” Actually, Pujol shows this way, using colors, sounds, and sometimes it seems that even the tastes and smells of his native Mediterranean, as well as a multilingual ensemble of actors, which easily and naturally switches from the comic register to the melo or simply dramatic. As a result, all the ingredients are mixed on the screen in a proportion, albeit not quite ideal, but capable of pleasing the most picky gourmets.