‘Daaaaaali!’ Review: Quentin Dupieux’s Daffy Homage to the Famed Surrealist is Delightful
variety.comJessica Kiang Salvador Dalí is walking down a hotel corridor. A hotel corridor is being walked down by Salvador Dalí. In a hotel, there is a corridor down which Salvador Dalí walks.
So begins — and begins and begins – Quentin Dupieux’s giddy, glitchy altogether delightful “Daaaaaali!” (imagine the title delivered by a practiced yodeler in the middle of a morning gargle).
It’s the oldest and lo-fi-est of cinematic tricks: a few simple cuts make it seem like a hotel hallway’s finite, solid space is elastic, stretching from the lift doors into carpeted absurdity.
Like the film as a whole, the gag gets funnier as it gets sillier, and becomes more of a homage to the surrealist painter’s ability to warp the reality around him, the more drunken its time-loop chronology. “A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order,” quoth Godard, but “Daaaaaali!” does him one better by having maybe three beginnings, six middles and four or five endings, none of them coming where they’re supposed to, all of them landing in the right place.
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