Salvador: Dolly
by Mimi Luse
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Little Ashes
Directed by Paul Morrison
In 2005, Christopher Maurer published Sebastian's Arrows, a book of Salvador Dalí's letters to the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. The two former schoolmates had a passionate, intellectual and, it is now known, romantic relationship. Little Ashes takes that fact as its starting point and stretches it (thin) into a period piece. During their student days in Madrid, dressed as dandies infloppy bow ties and tight vests, Lorca (Javier Beltrán) and Luis Buñuel (Matthew McNulty) speak thick lines about living/dying for anarchy/passion, while the porcelain-faced Robert Pattinson, playing Dalí', does his best to look depraved. These reenactors raise their strong jawlines and bushy eyebrows in pursuit of the radical aesthetic change their historical templates sought; they've been scripted to play out their anger with the status quo at a dinner party hosted by none other than... the status quo (in this case conservative supporters of Franco's regime). Sitting at the dinner table, wild-artist-genius Dalí unleashes some canned surrealism and shocks his hosts by screaming "I am the savior of modern art!", but all is made right by the soothsayer and poet-genius Lorca, who assuages his audience with a poem and brings the old farts to tears as they finally, finally understand the avant garde! "I brake for genius", Morrison seems to want to tell us, and he gives us a cheesy score and lots of laughable quotes about art and life.
Opens May 8
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