In Andalusía, under the olive trees.

[starlady]

I went with my friend S to see the movie "Little Ashes" last night. It explores the relationship between Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí from their student days until Lorca's assassination in 1936. Robert Pattinson proves that he actually can act (though his accent does slip at times, of which more anon) by inhabiting the role of Dalí surprisingly well, particularly after the artist's Paris debut and his construction of his flamboyant public persona, and I thought that the actor who played Lorca did an excellent job at conveying the poet's general inner anguish, particularly his homosexuality and his own extreme ambivalence toward it (ambivalence which his relationship with Dalí ironically helped him to overcome to some extent). S majored in Spanish and studied abroad in Spain for a year, and she pointed out that for all the movie's expanse, it doesn't really do a very effective job of portraying who Lorca actually was--a poet, yes, homosexual, yes, politically inclined, yes, but not much more than those very broad strokes, certainly not much of his actual thought, and don't go see this movie for an effective explication of the Spanish Civil War. Partly this is an artifact of the movie's focus on Dalí (the movie incorporates actual footage from Un Chien Andalou, as well as actual archival footage of Lorca's Popular Theater performances) and to a lesser extent on Luis Buñuel, who in the movie seems to have some sort of an unrequited thing (it looks a lot like homosocial, or homosexual, jealousy) for Lorca; Buñuel, who often rants about "faggots" and the decline of Spanish tradition (highly ironic from a Surrealist, of course) convinces Dalí to come to Paris at the height of the poet/artist affair, and then breaks with Dalí and becomes friends with Lorca again in 1936. I think the movie would have been improved by making the passage of time more explicit--the movie begins in 1922, and Dalí left for Paris in 1928, but the way it's shot, one would think barely six months had passed between Dalí showing up in Madrid and leaving for Paris.

The movie's dialogue is in English, except for when Lorca declaims his poetry: the actor switches to Spanish in the scene, and then him speaking the English translation is dubbed over that audio. I found this sort of half-heartedness to be somewhat disingenuous; I think the movie would have been fine completely in English (except of course for the random French Dalí spouts). As it is, I think the bilingualism calls too much attention to the artificiality of the artform--this, however, doesn't really clash with the movie's explication (and, since the movie generally takes Lorca's side, its skewering) of Dalí's sensibilities versus Lorca's, with Lorca very much coming out as the better human being. Certainly I sympathize with Lorca's political engagement far more than with Dalí's scorn for politics and fascination with his own genius and monetizing it. Being apolitical in Eruope in the 1930s seems to me to be a very high crime, but one of the somewhat frustrating things about Dalí is that, for all his greed, he was a brilliant artist--indeed, his very unabashed avarice anticipated some of the more important trends in later art, such as Andy Warhol and Takashi Murakami, both of whose works are situated somewhere between art and commercialism (and in Murakami's case, far closer to commercialism than to art). Certainly Dalí's career brings one hard up against the ingrained cultural idea that artists shouldn't be raking in the cash from their work, though of course the reality throughout history has been that successful artists do tend to make enough money to live comfortably or better by the standards of the time. Dalí, though, got into art with the intention of making money at least elevated to the equal of making art, which is part of what I find irritating about him.

All in all, it was a thought-provoking film, but it seemed slight where it should have been deep, and deep where it should have been shallow, particularly on the physicality of the Lorca/Dalí relationship. More mainstream movies with gay or bisexual protagonists need to be made, but I think the screenplay should have given more weight to other aspects of Dalí and Lorca than it did.

Comments

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

I was glad I saw it, but if I hadn't gotten a student discount on the ticket I might have felt gipped.