Surrealist’s life makes clocks melt
Ventura Pons, the writerproducer-director of “Miss Dalí,” has crafted an oddly clunky, egregiously overlong biopic that’s technically about Salvador Dalí’s younger sister and his onetime model, Anna Maria, but is closer to a cradle-to-grave lecture about the legendary Spanish surrealist. And all this curiously without offering even a glimpse of the painter’s iconic work.
In 1989, shortly after Salvador’s death, the elderly Anna Maria (Welsh actress Siân Phillips) is visited at her lovely home in seaside Cadaqués, Spain, by lifelong friend Maggie (Claire Bloom). Over drinks, food, strolls and lots of forced smiles and gazes, banal rejoinders and pensive gazing, Anna Maria methodically recounts for Maggie (make that: for us, Maggie already knows most of this) the highlights — and lowlights — of the Dalí siblings’ lives.
We thus flash back to an endless checklist of unevenly re-created events featuring such characters as Salvador’s seemingly monstrous wife, Gala (Rachel Lascar); poet-playwright Federico García Lorca (José Carmona); filmmaker Luis Buñuel (Alberto Ferreiro); and others.
Despite scads of stiff exposition and constant proclamations of Salvador’s genius, the brash, eccentric, weirdly mustachioed artist remains an elusive and puzzling force. That he’s played, unconvincingly from teen years to death, by an often annoying Joan Carreras doesn’t help. “Miss Dalí.” In Catalan, English, Spanish and French with English subtitles. Not rated. Running time: 2 hours, 49 minutes. Playing: Laemmle Monica Film Center, Santa Monica.