.png)
"Daliland" (UK Release: /10/13/23/)
Salvador Dalí (Ben Kingsley) is one of the most world-renowned artists of the 20th century. The film focuses on the later years of the strange and fascinating marriage between Dalí and his wife, Gala (Barbara Sukowa), as their seemingly unshakable bond begins to stress and fracture. Set in New York and Spain in 1974, the film is told through the eyes of James (Christopher Briney), a young assistant keen to make his name in the art world, who helps the eccentric and mercurial Dalí prepare for a big gallery show.
The character of James is the audience’s perspective. It's the story of Salvador Dali and his wife Gala and how both of them are trying to hold onto their youth and the things that get in the way of that. It’s about the sort of people they surround themselves with and this whole world that James gets taken into that, falls in love with it and gets spat back out of. James also falls in love with Ginesta (Suki Waterhouse). But, Ginesta and James are definitely on different pages. James sees that this girl is interested in him and he falls in love. It’s really sweet, but that’s so far from how she sees it and that causes a lot of pain for James. If only he’d looked ahead, he’d have realised he’d set himself up for that one! Dali and Gala lived in a New York hotel for much of the late 1960s and early 1970s, so the film is primarily set in New York. New York in the 1970s is a place of great discovery. An exciting period, pre-disco and the beginning of punk, which was portrayed in a very different way in the US compared to the UK. Dali is surrounding himself with the movers and shakers of that time so his entourage consisted of people who were there for a purpose, they all have something interesting about them, whether they're musicians, artists, beatniks, poets, aristocrats or art buyers.
The film is primarily about Dali’s fear of death. Even though he's a remarkable genius he's also very much like us. Dali’s life and career spanned six decades. The other element the film wants to explore is Dali as an older man in New York in the 1970s, hanging out at Studio 54: He's living this very modern 70s life, yet we all think of him as a surrealist from the 1930s. Dali was quite a crazy guy when Gala met him. At that time, she was in a relationship with Paul Éluard, the writer and she had lived in a menage a trois with Max Ernst and Éluard. When she met Dali, something really extreme happened in her life. She really is very fascinated by him and she fell in love with him and she knew that this is the man to whom she would dedicate her life. Dali is a voyeur and Gala stimulated him very much artistically. He likes her passion and she completely gave her life to him, although she has other relationships, especially later in her life. She was criticized and condemned for sexual relationships with men who were much younger than she was. Gala is in her 70s in the period in which the film takes place and she didn’t like to be photographed as much as Dali. The script throws them together in this very uneasy chemistry. She's a lady who has a very strict image, she loves couture and the big designers of the time and she loves jewelry. She did more than anyone else to foster Dali’s career and more than anyone else to damage it. That’s an interesting paradox. In Púbal, in Figueres where Gala’s castle is, there’s still a lot of her jewelry, including pieces designed by Dali.
The story of Dali’s house at Portlligat, is that it's a fisherman’s hut that Dali and Gala first bought together in 1930. It was their first house. It didn’t have any electricity or utilities. They then bought the one next door which was a bit higher up and they started knocking walls down, hence the different levels which made it very quirky and recognizable. Dali’s personality really comes through, so it’s almost like the house is another part of his character. He finished work on it in 1972 so it’s like another piece of his art. The film deals mainly with the time when they're older and they've this very successful artistic life and they've built this whole world around them. They surrounded themselves with much younger people in an attempt to recapture their youth. People like Alice Cooper (Mark McKenna) and Amanda Lear (Andreja Pejic) are in their lives because both Gala and Dali loved beauty so they wanted to have beautiful people around them. Maybe the realization he has at the end is not in a sad or depressing way, it’s just reflecting on this moment in his life where he lived in this dream of a world. It's a façade as were the people he met and the life that he lived for that time. James just ends up in a moment of reflection and sort of nostalgia and it’s a moment of appreciation for the time that he had in that world.
Amanda is this fabulous woman who has this great relationship with Dali and she's in the center of that art world in Paris and London. She dated David Bowie and she was the ’It’ girl of the 1970s and 1980s", before she becomes this sort of disco queen of Europe, like Grace Jones or Donna Summer. Captain Peter Moore (Rupert Graves) is Salvador Dali’s secretary, he did pretty much everything for him, including being an agent for his lithographs. He works on a commission basis and basically, he's part of Dali’s entourage. It’s very difficult to find out the truth about Moore because Dali is fabricator of reality, in his paintings and his life, and a lot of his entourage are also kind of fantasists we suppose. Moore wasn’t quite who he said he's, the English army Captain with the stiff upper lip. He's playing a part and we think that kind of pleased Dali who's happier with that rather than somebody who's authentic. Moore presents himself very well and is very charming, but he did some dodgy dealings, but a lot of people in the art world did dodgy dealings.
Dali is to the art world, what Almos Famous was to the rock and roll world. The glittering excesses of Dali’s fantastic circus, as seen through the young eyes of James, and the way he’s swept up into this opulent world, chewed up and spat out, until he realizes that the world’s quite a bit different than he dreamt it to be. There are many volumes where Dali is unkindly or dismissively judged. A distance that’s thrilling and terrifying, rather like a trapeze artist swinging back and forth, then suddenly the trapeze artist lets go and spins in mid-air and catches the other trapeze. It’s difficult to regulate the art world, because you’re selling people’s squiggles. Nobody knows how much they’re worth until somebody decides to pay that much for it. There’s a crossover between good and bad business practice in the art world and it’s very difficult to know where the edges are and that area can and has been exploited, even more so since Dali. It’s one of those things where you know it’s going to be special and then it happens, one of those times you’ll remember for the rest of your life.
Written by Gregory Mann
