The old age of surrealism – Weekend

“Being Salvador Dali”, a fairly fictionalized biopic about the sunset years of the leader of surrealism, is being released. 1970s celebrity roles throng the screen with movie stars, and director Mary Harron has a knack for films about counterculture figures. And not devoid of some philosophy. But this time, alas, the 70-year-old director only managed to mumble the hackneyed truth: “Old age is not a joy.”

Text: Alexey Vasiliev

In 1974, the purchasing power of 20 thousand US dollars corresponded to the current 120 thousand. That is how much, according to the authors of the new film about Salvador Dali, the 70-year-old Spanish surrealist artist at that time paid for a month of staying in a New York hotel. Do not ask for the name of the hotel or gallery whose owner had to fork out for that invoice issued by Dali: the circumstances of Dali’s life in the new film dedicated to him are not just fictionalized, but completely invented. Characters are invented, events are invented that at some point turn the biopic, if not into a criminal, then into a fraudulent tragedy, for sure, relationships are invented: so, for all Dali’s loud publicity, which he himself provoked, nothing indicates that he was in such close relationship with glam rocker Alice Cooper, as shown in the film. The protagonist was invented – a young employee of the gallery, in whom Dali recognized Saint Sebastian and “borrowed the boy” for the period of preparation of the exhibition. When the boy is horrified by the huge bill for a hotel room, the gallerist boss explains: this amount includes service and evenings with caviar and champagne river. Directly not a biography of the artist, but a screen version of Amanda Lear’s song “Fashion Pack”, which painted the chic of the New York bohemia of the 1970s: champagne, caviar, haute couture, expensive cars. Lear, this disco-siren-intellectual, will also be in the film: that’s who really was not just a favorite, but to a certain extent a creature of Dali. Only here, performed by the transgender Bosnian model Andreja Pejic, she does not look like a dazzling potbelly stove with a hoarse voice and a mermaid body, well known to Soviet viewers, but like Elena Vaenga in a Dusty Springfield wig.

“Being Salvador Dali” is the most shameless and slovenly parade of mummers that the cinema has given out under the sauce of retrobiography. The eyes of Alice Cooper, famous for his demonic make-up, were blackened, such an impression, a half-drunk schoolgirl of perestroika times, and she used exactly that mother’s reinforced concrete mascara “Leningradskaya”, in which – to dip a brush in it – you first had to spit. Ben Kingsley, 40 years ago awarded an Oscar for his convincing portrayal of Gandhi, writhing in the role of Dali on the floor in some kind of another creative attack, in carelessly dyed shoulder-length curls looks more like a living thing – God forbid! – the painting “An attack of indigestion at Igor Nikolaev.” A veteran of German cinema, who caught Fassbinder and von Trotta, Barbara Zukova in the role of Gala is a portrait spitting image and gives exactly the vixen that we imagine at the mention of Dali’s wife – but even her wig at some point moves categorically to one side, exposing gray hair

However, the last incident is a director’s device, designed to more clearly convey the author’s idea. Mary Harron, co-writer (with husband John Walsh) and director of the film, as a cinematographer proper, lacked stars from the sky, but remains an artist of her own theme. This theme is Bergman’s – face and mask, but Harron studies it without Bergman’s rigid puritanism, which brought the Swedish genius to monosyllabic clarity even in the choice of titles for his paintings: “Face”, “Person”. Harron is restless, talkative, preferring not so much to peer into a question until she’s blue in the face, but rather to propose it from as many angles as possible. One of the overtones of the theme that particularly disturbs her personally is the creative impulse in its purity and the farce that one has to embark on in order to monetize it. Since the mid-1990s, she has been a faithful fellow traveler of generation X: we were fond of the counterculture, and she looked for interesting stories. So, in the film “I Shot Andy Warhol” (1996), she showed the party of the pop-artist of the time when he became interested in cinema, from a special angle: through the eyes of Valerie Solanas, the creator of the feminist Manifesto of the Society for the Complete Destruction of Men. In Lewd Bettie Page (2005), she revealed to us the figure of the first S/M fashion model of the 1950s. And, of course, Harron made the only successful film adaptation of the novel by cult Xer author Bret Easton Ellis: her American Psycho (2000) acquired a cult following and created for Christian Bale the acting reputation that he, starting from the experience of working on this role, developed into its unique “star” handwriting.

In general, working with actors has always been Harron’s forte: the same “Andy Warhol”, for example, capitalized Lili Taylor as the main crazy movie of the 1990s. But “Dali”, unfortunately, suffers precisely from the skittish level of acting performance. Even the highly experienced Kingsley, who is scalpel accurate here in individual human and / or pathological manifestations, is not able to reward his hero even with the degree of persuasiveness with which he turned out in 22-year-old Robert Pattinson in Echoes of the Past (2008). What can we say about the obscene Ezra Miller, portraying Harron Dali in his youth with that techno-color posterry with which last time geniuses were shown in the cinema, except perhaps in biopics of the late Stalin era like “Przhevalsky” and “Pies”. When Dali recalls his youth, Harron uses an absurd trick from a bad Tuzovsky performance: Dali the old man and Amanda Lear listening to him and the young gallery owner respectfully huddle against the wall, letting young actors into the proscenium reciting old replicas of Dali, Gala, Eluard and company.

The main failure was the choice of the protagonist, an actor for the role of a young gallery owner, through whose eyes we look at the story of Dali – all reviewers agree on this. Dali compares him not only with Saint Sebastian, but also with an angel, Gala frankly drools over him, Suki Waterhouse, as some kind of model, drags him to bed and sends kisses to his ass (to put it bluntly, without reason). And even if without makeup he could still pass for an indispensable blunt bum in any boy band, then under the plucked and summed up a la Marlene, Dietrich’s eyebrows draw more on the epithet “stupid cow”. It is difficult to imagine a viewer who agrees with the attitude to watch Dali’s life with a cow’s eye, to associate his beautiful eyes with these colorless senseless saucers.

However, in the film about Dali, Harron opened a new moment of reflection on the theme of “face and mask”, which she had not previously voiced in her work. This is old age as another mask that time clings to us: that’s why Gala-Zukova’s wig comes off in the middle of the opening of the exhibition. Harron herself turned 70 this year, and her concern is understandable. It is possible that the deliberate props of the situation and the gaudiness of the make-up are not the worst way to convey the intolerability and inevitability of this last mask to which a person is doomed. But, you see… We go to the movies for pleasure. Voluntarily locking yourself up for an hour and a half with Dali and Gala like that is like lusting after a wrinkled old woman with all the ardor. There are few applicants. Including the old woman herself.

In theaters May 25

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