Mal’s rating: two and one-half stars
With his little pencil moustache evident, Salvador Dali once gave a lecture at the Sorbonne with his foot in a pail of milk and a press conference with a boiled lobster on his head. At the 1936 London Surrealist exhibit, he entered with two white Russian wolfhounds with himself wearing a diving suit topped by a Mercedes Benz radiator cap. Since the suit was bolted shut, no one could hear him and, since it was nearly air tight, he began to gasp for air.
Neither scene is in the movie “Little Ashes” which deals more with why the artist who called himself Mr. Surrealism went crazy than with his craziness.
“The only difference between a madman and myself,” he once said, “is that I am not mad.” He also said, and obviously believed, that “If you play at genius, you become one.”
“Little Ashes” is not so lucky with its masquerade but it, nonetheless, is adept at the game of literary, arty name-calling. It doesn’t have much substance but, set in 1920s Madrid, it has a lot of mood.
The Naro Theater, lately, has sported a number of “real life” bios of everyone from Dylan Thomas to the woebegone rock group called The Anvil. Here, there is an all-star threesome of Spanish culture, all attending school in Madrid in 1922. Playwright Federico Garcia Lorca is joined by famed filmmaker Luis Bunnel.
Teen Salvador Dali is played by Robert Pattison who is quite the rage nowadays as the threatening vampire boy in “Twilight” and its upcoming sequels. As Dali, he arrives dressed as an effeminate British dandy and quickly emerges as someone of artistic talent. At the center of things is his supposedly unconsumated attraction to Garcia Lorca who became one of the greatest writers of Spanish culture and was murdered by Spanish fascists in 1936.
Lorca (author of “Blood Wedding” as well as “The House of Bernarda Alba”) is played by Javier Beltran and should be the center of the film, but he has too little screen time. As suggested, Lorca seems honest about his attraction to the confused boy artist Dali, leading to a twilight beach kiss, but no more.
Things get hot, very hot, when a defiant, perhaps frustrated, Lorca has sex with the social gadabout Margarita, played by Marina Gatell, as a demolished and hurt Dali watches - hovering in the corner. It is one of the more provocative sex-duel scenes in recent films.
As a result, Dali runs away to the Paris of 1928 and becomes famous by painting what he calls his “critical paranoia.” He was terrified of insects, crossing streets and of just about everything. He carried a piece of driftwood at all times to ward off evil. We are meant, one supposes, to reason that all this is because of unrequited love but, back in Spain, Lorca too feels abandoned. Who’s jilting who and is the homophobia of the era the real problem?
Dali joins with their other friend, filmmaker Bunel to make the famous “Un Chien Andalou”: (“The Andalusian Dog”) which is known to film students, mainly, as the film where a woman’s eyeball was slit with a knife. (Actually, it was a pig, but that is small comfort to the pig).
As directed by Paul Morrison, “Little Ashes” is not nearly as decadent and shocking as it pretends to be. It has one foot in the world of “Masterpiece Theater” and the other in the National Enquirer. Pattison contributes more of a parody than a performance as Dali - something like attending a costume party. His hordes of female teen fans may show up but they’ll like him better as the vampire boy. On the other hand, an androgynous look hasn’t seemed to have hurt teen idols lately.
“Little Ashes” is more tease than anything else. No one goes all the way and everything is speculation. Although the personal lives of three great artists of Spanish culture are trotted out, is it, really, any of our business?
Cast: Robert Pattison, Javier Beltran, Matthew McNulty, Marina Gatell Director: Paul Morrison Screenplay: Philppa Goslett MPAA rating: R (sexual content, language, brief, disturbing, scene from the classic “The Andalusian Dog”)
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