Daliland: Artist as Corrupting Tyrant

A safe and unambitious biopic is candid about the failings of the elderly Surrealist.

Daliland (Mary Harron dir., 2022) opens with James (Christopher Briney) a young man starting up in the art business as an assistant to a New York gallerist, who represents Salvador Dalí (Ben Kingsley). In 1974 the Surrealist was deep in a period of decline. Already diminished in creativity, distracted by the lure of easy money by endorsements and advertisements, Dalí was painting little. James is tasked by his employer and the painter’s avaricious wife Gala (Barbara Sukowa) to assist the master in painting sufficient pictures for a fast-approaching exhibition.

James is thrust into the weird world of Dalí, filled with the extravagant and perverted. Rock star Alice Cooper (Mark McKenna) makes an appearance, as does Amanda Lear (Andreja Pejic), the alleged transsexual and a host of pseudonymous groupies and models. They populate the extravagant parties and happenings arranged by Dalí, who took pleasure in observing rather than participating. Gala usually excused herself from the all-night parties and orgies, leaving Dalí to preside over (and direct) the debauchery. As the painter’s manager, Captain Peter Moore (Rupert Graves) tells James, the intention of the artist is to cretinize the subjects of his court. He wants them to compromise themselves, not so much to blackmail them, but to assure himself that his dysfunctions are commonplace and to delight in perversion. Ultimately, the film suggests that freed from inhibition and oversight, all suffer when they give in to their base drives – including Dalí and Gala.

The first half of the film revolves around the relationship between James and Ginesta (Suki Waterhouse), a model, and James’s developing understanding of Dalí as he works in the makeshift studio of the Hotel Mercure, New York. Ingenue James comes to learn of the dark side of Dalí’s court, where people reinvent themselves to please themselves and seduce others. The directorial and script strikes a balance between allowing matters to evolve naturally and use subtext to convey it messages and the necessity of fitting in exposition. James is instructed in the difference between an artist’s original print and an offset lithograph, something that will play a central part in the second half of the film.

The second half of the film is set in Port Lligat, where James sees the depths of Dalí’s weaknesses and glimpses of his brilliance. James becomes involved in the smuggling of forged Dalí prints. Eventually James faces the choice between continuing to serve the master and extricating himself from a web of duplicity and crime. Structurally, the film is good. James – well cast and well-acted by Briney – makes a sympathetic point-of-view character for the audience and his story is not far from that of a number of Dalí’s entourage. Not a few of Dalí’s circle ended up with criminal judgements against them or being sued on commercial matters.  

Ben Kingsley’s Dalí is very good. Physically, he is close to the artist in appearance. His voice is not Dalí’s rolling baritone and Kingsley (prudently) decided to lighten the thick Catalan accent and speed up the slow theatrical delivery, rendering the artist’s dialogue more manageable for dramatic purposes. He comes close to the master’s magnetic stare. The swings between grand froideur and childish tantrum match descriptions given by those in Dalí’s circle. Similarly, Barbara Sukowa’s Gala is every bit as pitiful and fearsome as the real-life woman, who remained an enigma to all who knew her. The hitting, book-hurling and spitting are entirely accurate, driven by her fear of poverty and anxiety at her waning attractiveness. She seeks sex, companionship and youth through her affair with Jeff Fenholt (Zachary Nachbar-Seckel), star of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, at the same time aware in private of her physical frailty. The film pulls no punches regarding Fenholt’s attentions being driven primarily by money and ego rather than romantic attachment to Gala, who was old enough to be his grandmother.   

When I was writing my monograph on Dalí (linked here), I had to decide how much of Dalí peculiarities to include. As it happens, in a short book focusing on the art, little of Dalí distasteful personal behaviour proved relevant. His art retains a power to shock, with its depictions of excrement, putridity, extreme sexual activity and cruelty remaining plain. Dalí explained that the honest depiction of his psychological complexes and dreams was demanded by the credo of Surrealist fidelity to the subconscious. The truth is that Dalí loved to shock and was self-obsessed to a point where his perversities would have found their way to the surface, with or without Surrealist theory to bolster it. The film somewhat underplays the sexual depravity that Dalí encouraged and inflicted, probably because it would have taken the rating to 18 and have reduced our sympathy for the subject.   

We get to see none of Dalí’s art, due to copyright restrictions, but we get fair approximations that suffice. The art of the period was particularly weak and this fault is barely touched upon in the film. The film is not really about Dalí’s artistic collapse, more about the consequences of his unhindered personal vices: greed, perversity, selfishness, narcissism, cruelty. In this respect, the film is successful. It does allow us to see Dalí’s wildness of imagination, his deep love for Gala (albeit soured) and his early genius. Flashback scenes feature Ezra Miller as the young Dalí and Avital Lvova as the young Gala. We see the famous meeting of the couple in Cadaqués, when Dalí was a young man barely keeping himself from falling into madness and Gala was married to Dalí’s mentor-cum-collector, Paul Éluard.    

Certain liberties have to be taken in any story and Daliland is no exception. For example, the flashback scene in which Dalí is inspired to paint The Persistence of Memory is set, for story reasons, in Port Lligat rather than the Dalís’ apartment in Paris. However, the essence of Dalí story is retained. Gala was wrapped in a blanket (not uncovered) when her body was transported illegally by her chauffeur. Generally, the film makers have kept accurate to fact, with some necessary elision and reordering for dramatic purposes. I did not find the day-for-night effect distracting. Generally, the film has a strong cinematic character in its cinematography, unshowy and often underplayed when the temptation must have been to exaggerate strangeness.

Daliland has decent pace and achieves pathos in places, when we see Dalí at home in the rocky coastal landscape, recalling his past, his faculties faltering. It allows us the space to reach our own conclusions about how much of his compromised state in his latter years is due to Gala’s voracious greed and how much due to Dalí’s inherent weaknesses of character. Could the film have been more ambitious, take more risks? Yes, probably, but Daliland as it is works as drama as well as a biopic. Anyone is search of something experimental will find it elsewhere. Overall, this reviewer recommends Daliland for afficionados (who will know where to distinguish representation from reality) and casual fans (who do not, and need not, care).

Daliland is available on Blu-Ray, DVD and streaming services now.