Rating: NR | Runtime: 77 minutes
Release Date: February 7th, 2024 (France) / October 4th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Diaphana Distribution / Music Box Films
Director(s): Quentin Dupieux
Writer(s): Quentin Dupieux

Writer/director Quentin Dupieux makes the visual joke himself at the very end of his latest film Daaaaaalí! via Jonathan Cohen applauding himself (as Salvador Dalí) only to have Edouard Baer replace him, while holding a frame of Cohen’s face, to applaud himself (as Salvador Dalí) instead. The gag is pretty much the movie in a nutshell: a figure holding up a depiction of himself within a scene that infinitely repeats itself within itself. Only Dupieux has replaced that depiction with a mirror—a carnival mirror, more precisely—that warps the image ever so slightly to ensure we haven’t the foggiest clue of what’s coming next … or, perhaps, again.

It’s the perfect sort of absurdly surreal take to render another Salvador Dalí film acceptable. As the character himself admits, there are already too many cinematic representations of him. So, why make another? The answer, quite simply, is because you can. The real question isn’t therefore for the maker, but the viewer. Why watch another? In many cases I’d argue I wouldn’t, but Dupieux’s singular creativity promises that we won’t be disappointed if we decide to try anyway. Because he has the vision to present a biopic that rejects biography. Why supply details real fans already know when you can bring Dalí’s essence alive instead?

Thus, the six “As” in the title to represent six different actors (yes, Boris Gillot’s ten-second cameo counts) playing the titular role. Baer is arguably the main iteration, older yet not oldest. Cohen comes in second as the younger yet not youngest variation. Pio Marmaï pops up now and then as their junior. Gilles Lellouche arrives sporadically to split the difference. And Didier Flamand sits in his wheelchair, at once a figment of Dalí’s hallucinogenic mind and, perhaps, the “real” Dalí suffering from the addition of senility to his fits of genius to create an out-of-time and out-of-body experience presenting his entire life at once.

Our lead, however, is Judith Rochant (Anaïs Demoustier). A pharmacist-turned-journalist still cutting her teeth, she becomes obsessed with finishing a profile of Dalí that abruptly ended when he discovered he wan’t being filmed. So, with the help of a producer (Romain Duris’ Jérôme), she pivots from magazine article to documentary with the goal of giving her subject everything he wants to make him think the profile was his idea in the first place. Mishaps ensue. Confusion abounds. And the never-ending dream of a priest (Éric Naggar) loops and melts into reality to the point of no longer knowing if the entire thing is just a manifestation of Dalí’s ADHD-riddled superego.

The result is an entertaining journey into the artistic chaos of genius and the necessity of luck and coincidence to even begin hoping to herd the cats that are Dalí’s fractured visages of himself. You know what you’re getting right from the start too as Baer’s approach down the hotel hallway to Judith’s room becomes an interminably long marathon of which Dalí would need to be walking in place for it to make logical sense. But it’s not supposed to be logical. It’s supposed to be a film unraveling as if it were one of the artist’s own paintings. A loop of insane interactions consuming each other as though part of some multiversal implosion at the end of Dalí’s life. One final, jumbled slideshow flashing before his eyes.

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Edouard Baer and Anaïs Demoustier in DAAAAAALÍ!; courtesy of Music Box Films.