Little Ashes
Directed by Paul Morrison
at Chelsea Clearview, Paris & Landmark
Runtime: 112 min.
Little Ashes is a
melodrama about the gay closet focusing on poet Frederico García
Lorca’s love for painter Salvador Dalí when both were students just
before the Spanish Civil War. As schoolmate Luis Buñuel womanizes in
the distance, Lorca and Dalí torment and tease each other due to social
and personal repression. Director Paul Morrison and
screenwriter Philippa Goslett aren’t stupidly PC like Kirby Dick;
instead, being starstruck weakens their love story.
Superficial
celebrity-ogling (a form of gossip-mongering) gets in the way of
portraying Lorca, Dalí and Buñuel as individuals forging their sexual
identities.This pre-fame prism lacks the sense of danger that might
explain Lorca’s daring and Dalí’s deviousness as two sides of the same
closet crisis. Robert Pattinson braves Dalí’s eccentricity and grows
with it. Javier Beltrán makes Lorca more priggish than heroic.The
filmmakers sabotage their political sympathies with dull casting.
Their
aesthetics are also drab. Imitation surrealist montages—from Lorca and
Dalí swimming in azure pools, B&W études in the style of Un Chien Andalou (even
pilfering the famous eyeball slashing)—don’t make up for the overall
Merchant-Ivory sense of classy banality (youthful dalliance in college
linens).
Just recently, John Maybury’s Edge of Love captured the personal folly of pioneering artists and, of course, Alan Rudolph’s Investigating Sex and The Moderns set the bar for films about cultural innovators who move the culture forward despite their messy lives. Little Ashes is
named after a Dalí painting inspired by Lorca, but in this rarefied
genre, the real masterpiece is Rudolph’s Dorothy Parker bio, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.
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