Little Ashes

Little Ashes

112 Minutes

Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s film, L’Age D’or (1930), contains images of man’s face covered with flies; a blind man being kicked; a pseudo-documentary on scorpions; clerically-garbed skeletons on rocky cliffs; a pompous foundation-laying ceremony interrupted by a man and a woman noisily coupling in mud; guests at a fancy reception ignoring a farm cart rolling through; a cuckolded lover throwing a live archbishop out the window; a survivor of the “most brutal of orgies” emerging dressed as Christ, a young girl passionately fellating the toe of a religious statue. The film was banned and condemned as “…the most repulsive corruption of our age… the new poison which Judaism, masonry, and rabid, revolutionary sectarianism want to use in order to corrupt the people.” Incendiary characters that can produce such scandalous work are first-class ingredients for a storyteller.

Born almost with cinema itself, Buñuel, surrealist, iconoclast, contrarian and provocateur, was a singular figure in world cinema and a consecrated auteur from the start. Dalí was the flamboyant and eccentric master of the avant-garde and the best known images of the Surrealist movement including the famous Persistence of Memory (1931). Federico García Lorca is one of the most beloved, deeply appreciated, highly revered and influential of all modern poets. Passionate, urgent, haunting and evocative, Lorca also wrote dramatic, modernist plays, but his poems are the jewel of his work.

Set in the cultural and political tumult of 1920s Madrid, Little Ashes, a weirdly sketchy and underpopulated biographical drama, re-imagines these fascinating and talented men as dullards and the result is a preposterous, soporific depiction of an invented Brokeback Mountain-style love affair between Dalí and Lorca. Dalí, who married Gala Éluard in 1934, denied any physical relationship with Lorca. In Alain Bosquet’s 1969 Conversations with Dalí he tells that Lorca “was homosexual, as everyone knows, and madly in love with me. He tried to screw me twice. I was extremely annoyed because I wasn’t homosexual and I wasn’t interested in giving in. Besides, it hurts. So nothing came of it. But I felt awfully flattered vis-à-vis the prestige. Deep down I felt that he was a great poet and that I owe him a tiny bit of the Divine Dalí’s asshole.”

Lorca (Javier Beltran), Dalí (Robert Pattison) and Buñuel (Matthew McNulty) meet and live together through the late 1920s and early 1930s at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid: an extraordinary pedagogical and social experiment driven by Giner de los Ríos’ ideal of bringing together the best of Spanish and European creative thinkers, artists and scientists, into a kind of cultural cauldron. They became known as La Generacion del 27, alongside other notable Spanish poets of the decade. Rebelling against the conservative romanticism present in Spain, and inspired by the cubist work of Picasso, this small group of painters, poets and playwrights form the new Spanish Surrealist avant-garde.

The trio lead the decadent university social elite, but as time passes, Dalí and Lorca are drawn closer to each other, and on a holiday trip to Dalí’s seaside hometown of Cadaques, a kiss turns the friendship into something more. Buñuel, who’s relegated to third-wheel status and homophobe, scowls from the sidelines when he becomes aware that Lorca has fallen for Dalí and moves to Paris. Dalí and Lorca’s feelings deepen into a love affair which the sexually repressed artist tries and fails to consummate.

Playing the larger-than-life Dalí is an acting dream come true. Trying out and discarding a series of loony ensembles and hairstyles, Pattison goes for broke. He’s terribly intense, taking a cue from the Christopher Walken school of acting. The rest of the cast is merely wooden and prisoner to the earnest, talky conventions of period melodramas. In what could have been an the only inspired bit in Little Ashes, Lorca recites his verses in voice-over narration, but even that the filmmakers manage to botch that by running simultaneous audio, in Spanish and English, so that it’s impossible to take in and appreciate the beautiful words.

It’s sad when the wrong people get their hands on good material. The filmmakers reject juicy bits of history and opt for melodramatic romance novel scenarios, most notably the moonlit skinny dipping sequence where Dalí and Lorca share their first kiss. Little Ashes’s greatest transgression is the omission of personality, character, artistic contributions and almost everything else that made them special. The trio is like a helpless truffle in the hands of a Denny’s short order cook. Little Ashes is a well-meaning but shockingly boring tribute to three daring and intense lives. I am appalled, not just for me, but for Dalí, Lorca and Buñuel, who would have undoubtedly mocked Little Ashes with disdain.

by Teri Carson