LITTLE ASHES directed by Paul Morrison, written by Philippa Goslett, with Robert Pattinson, Javier Beltrán and Matthew McNulty. A Kino-Smith release. 112 minutes. Opens Friday (May 22). For venues and times see movie listings. Rating: NNNN
Robert Pattinson’s twilight fans may not be ready for their idol’s take on Salvador Dalí, but if they can embrace Katy Perry kissing a girl, they should suck it up and cope with Pattinson kissing a guy in Little Ashes.
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This new quasi-biopic is over the top, for sure. It’s got hottie Pattinson chowing down on the scenery, actors speaking in sometimes unintelligible accents and a very questionable premise.
But so what? It’s totally beautiful and very entertaining.
Three of Spain’s soon-to-become great artists – Dalí (Pattinson), Luis Buñuel (Matthew McNulty) and Federico García Lorca (Javier Beltrán) party on as residents at the University of Madrid’s student hostel in 1919.
García Lorca’s attracted to Dalí (who looks like Little Lord Fauntleroy) and pursues a friendship, ignoring Buñuel’s budding homophobia, but the relationship is only consummated via a strange faux threesome.
By this film’s lights, it was Dalí’s internal conflict over the affair that ignited his most daring creative impulses and, later, drove him to Paris. There, his career took off and his path diverged from García Lorca’s, Dalí’s veering toward commercial success and García Lorca’s toward resisting fascism in Spain.
It’s not a very credible theory. True, Dalí and García Lorca had a friendship and the latter wanted more, but if you’re an ambitious creative talent, you don’t need to suffer from internalized homophobia to want to be in Paris.
Little Ashes has a lot going for it. Start with the charismatic Beltrán. He’s yummy as the revolutionary poet who paid the price for his political beliefs.
Pattinson goes to Malkovichian excess as the iconoclastic surrealist, playing Dalí as a crazed combination of ego and sexual insecurity. It’s a surprisingly in-your-face performance by someone who was doing a deer-in-the-headlights routine at the teen screamfests he experienced in the wake of Twilight’s release.
And cinematographer Adam Suschitzky’s done wonders with what’s alleged to have been a tiny budget, making the most of his Spanish locations.
Surrealism’s making a comeback. Cinematheque is showing some of the Buñuel and Dalí films the movie references. (Note to those dreading the famous sliced-eyeball sequence in Un Chien Andalou: it’s referenced but not actually reproduced here.) And the Art Gallery of Ontario’s current Surreal Things probes the movement’s impact on design.
But there’s nothing like a full-blown melodramatic evocation of artists who lived life large.
susanc@nowtoronto.com
