Little Ashes Review

By Ali Catterall
Drama about the lives and loves of the young Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel and Federico García Lorca in 1920s Madrid
According to Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca, the gay poet and dramatist, had been "madly in love" with him. "He tried to screw me," said Dali. "Twice." But the affair was never consummated because, said the painter, "it hurts".

Whatever the truth of the matter (Dalí would say just about anything to get a reaction - or for money), Little Ashes screenwriter Philippa Goslett has taken this, and the pair's supposed innuendo-laced correspondence, as the starting block for a torrid melodrama about forbidden love and artistic integrity, sketching in the details until the facts become as pliant as one of Dalí's timepieces.

The year is 1922, the city is Madrid, and three creative geniuses just happen to be lodging together in student digs while unleashing a firestorm of modernity upon the world. The first act of the film has fun presenting a portrait of the artists as young dogs. Or in Federico's case, an Andalusian one; he later claimed surrealist wind-up Un Chien Andalou was a personal attack on him by his former chums.

Here's bolshie Buñuel (Matthew McNulty), upbraiding Lorca (Javier Beltrán) for not being more of a modernist. And here's a "strategically placed copy of Freud" on somebody's desk. So which one's Dalí? Oh, there he is, a pale, effete lad, more stick insect than Catalan, pulling up to the doors of the Residencia in lace sleeves, knee-high boots and a poncy page-boy haircut. You can always spot those first-year art students a mile off, can't you?

If Lorca's the wound, Buñuel's the scab. And Dalí (Robert Pattinson) is trying so hard to be edgy and out there ("how do you feel about communal defecation?" he drunkenly demands of a society hostess), he loses sight of the fact he naturally is. The three consolidate their friendships, and as is often the way with trios, Buñuel pinballs between Lorca and Dalí, who have initially become far closer. How close? Well, let's just hope the queer-bashing Buñuel doesn't find out about it. Caramba! Too late.

Although Little Ashes concerns artists and the artistic impulse, it's not what you'd call an 'art movie', sharing more DNA with, say, Lust For Life than 1991's Van Gogh. At its best, it does a good job of showing how it feels to navigate that tricky passage between late adolescence and early-twenties.

But as a would-be penetrating expose, it's too polite, too compromised and stagey. Perhaps owing to its modest £1.4m budget, it looks - and sounds (everyone ees speekeeng like thees) like a teleplay, featuring stilted dialogue and heavy-handed symbolism, such as a scene of a heartbroken Lorca transposed with that of a slain bull in the ring.

In the reductive way of biopics, Lorca's a sap, Dalí's a brat, and Buñuel's a yob. Beltrán elegantly conveys the poet's raw sensitivity ("like an animal that's been skinned" as Dalí puts it), though can't quite pull off his celebrated magnetism; the film would rather he fulfill his role as passive victim. Love interest Robert Pattinson is perhaps not yet old enough to play the bug-eyed dandy with the upside-down moustache, an exemplar of John Updike's aphorism that "Fame is a mask that eats into the face". Yet his grasp of Dalí-esque tics and gestures suggest natural comic ability. He's wasted on those fantasy movies; he should play Buster Keaton.

For his part, Matthew McNulty is saddled with the sketchiest, and for dramatic reasons, least sympathetic role as the bullish homophobe. Anyone wishing to get a fuller picture of his Residencia days should be directed to his autobiography 'My Last Breath', in which he says of Lorca, "Of all the human beings I've ever known, Federico was the finest."

For the sake of argument, let us suppose an affair did occur, outside of Dalí's febrile imagination. However, by getting bogged down in a tease of a romance (this is a gay film for straights; nothing to scare the donkeys here), the drama sidesteps the prevailing politics - vital to a real appreciation of the artists' anti-establishment stance, and all but cruises past the Spanish Civil War. Lorca's arrest and murder by fascist firing squad is predictably soft-pedalled, with the camera discretely pulling away from the forensics of his notorious dispatch; finished off with a pistol in his anus ("two shots up the bum, because he was a poof" an assassin later confessed).

Ultimately, Little Ashes, a piece of commercial entertainment made on the other side of the twentieth century, lacks the courage of its case studies' convictions. This is most clearly illustrated by how far it's prepared to go in one direction, but not the other. In the movie's most hysterical scene, a self-loathing Lorca beds his unhappy fag-hag Margarita (Marina Gatell) as a substitute Dalí, while the distraught painter voyeuristically watches. Whether the incident has any basis in reality or not, it's integral to the dramatic arc, and extremely graphic - nudging hardcore. Yet to portray this, in such prurient detail, but not its homosexual flipside - the poet attempting and failing to penetrate the painter (whether it happened or not), seems cowardly, and indicative of that bourgeois morality the film's subjects were doing their damndest to smash through.
Verdict
Too discreet, too charming and too bourgeois.
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