Robert Pattinson trapped in strange new movie.
Actually, it’s hard to imagine who could play this outlandish character — a man who appeared to believe that life itself was too small to contain him. In Pattinson’s attempted impersonation, we see the pampered young Dalí arriving at the Residencia in a hugely ridiculous frilly shirt and jaw-length bowl-cut hair. Tottering out of his grand car into a bustle of fellow students, he looks like a marionette with a few strings missing, or a rag doll in need of repair. He seems trapped and terrified. But since social reticence is not a quality we associate with the overbearingly outré Dalí, we soon begin to wonder if it isn’t the actor himself who feels desperately out of place in this strange film.
The picture’s focus is on the relationship between García Lorca, a closeted and tormented homosexual, and the flamboyantly odd painter, whose sexual inclinations are anybody’s guess. (He claimed to be exclusively heterosexual.) Dalí knew the poet was in love with him, but always insisted that on the two occasions when García Lorca came on to him sexually, he turned him down. The movie would have it otherwise. (After a while, we wish that we could, too.)
There are some truly shameless scenes here. We see García Lorca shooting lovelorn glances at Dalí, then scurrying off in a fit of guilt to confide to a plaster Madonna that “I have had impure thoughts.” We see the boys recumbent on a beach, Dalí with his head propped on his friend’s thigh as García Lorca reads his poetry aloud. There’s an artsy nude moonlight swim that with only the tiniest of adjustments could be converted into a cologne commercial. And there’s a spectacularly lurid interlude in which García Lorca, desperate to demonstrate an acceptable manliness, has sex with a woman on a bed while Dalí watches (possibly masturbating, not sure) from a dark corner of the room.
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