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Little Ashes (Film)

by Annette Basile | January 04, 2010 13:03 | Edited January 04, 2010 13:05

The miscasting of Robert ‘Twilight’ Pattinson as Dali and a cliché-ridden approach ruins an intriguing premise.

If you think the idea of Twilight's Robert Pattinson playing a young Salvador Dali is a bit of a stretch, you're absolutely right. Dali enters dressed as a dandy, with a frilly shirt and a bad wig - and Pattinson does not look comfortable. Dali soon loses the dandy look, but a self-conscious Pattinson holds on to the discomfort. It's not so much bad acting as bad casting. And it's not the film's only problem. Little Ashes is a minefield of visual and verbal cliches, yet underneath there's an interesting, apparently true tale.

 

Madrid, 1922. Dali is an art student discovering his soon-to-be-famous surrealist style. He meets two others that, like him, will one day make significant impacts on their chosen fields - burgeoning poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca (Javier Beltran) and future filmmaker Luis Bunuel (Matthew McNulty). They're radicals during a time of oppression. But Little Ashes isn't about art and politics - it's about the rumoured romance between Dali and Garcia Lorca.

 

British filmmaker Paul Morrison (Wondrous Oblivion) fleetingly captures a real intimacy between the repressed pair, but doesn't sustain it. Yet he surprises with the occasional decent moment, like a nighttime sequence where the potential lovers tentatively embrace in the water. But even that scene gets ruined by a syrupy soundtrack that makes the romantic moves look like satire.

 

Javier Beltran - a Spanish actor making his feature debut - is the film's only redeeming feature. His Garcia Lorca is solid. Beltran embraces his trite lines, and shows Pattinson up.

 

The final act has Pattinson sporting Dali's trademark upturned moustache. On Dali, it looked willfully eccentric. On Pattinson, it's comical.

 

The film, however, concludes with a genuinely dramatic flourish that works thanks to Beltran. He can't save Little Ashes, however, from its bad casting, bad props and landslide of cliches.