Little Ashes

Director: Paul Morrison
Screenwriters: Philippa Goslett
Starring: Robert Pattinson, Javier Beltrán, Matthew McNulty (interview), Marina Gatell
Running time: 112 mins
Certificate: 15

British director Paul Morrison has a knack for creating emotionally affecting dramas. His last film Wondrous Oblivion was a widely-praised coming-of-age tale about a very un-cinematic sport, cricket. Previously, he helmed the multi-lingual Oscar-nominated Solomon And Gaenor, which helped to launch the career of Ioan Gruffudd. With Little Ashes, he turns his attention to the Spanish artistic avant-garde and how Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel and Federico García Lorca made their mark on the early 20th century.

This biographical film charts the first meeting of Dalí (Pattinson), Buñuel (McNulty) and Lorca (Beltrán) as they cross paths as young men at university in Madrid. At first shy and introverted (and arriving dressed like a cross between Russell Brand and Slade's Dave Hill), Dalí is brought out of his shell by poet Lorca and Buñuel, with whom he would go on to produce the surrealist eyeball-slicing film Un chien andalou. It is the former relationship that forms the crux of this film, though, with Morrison showing how the pair's friendship becomes something more then dissipates as Dalí flees to Paris.

In making a film about three revolutionary artists in their formative years, Morrison has immense scope to delve into their genius and find out what made them tick. To Little Ashes's detriment, he never peels back those layers and investigates what stirred their minds, instead focusing on what stirred their loins. It does succeed, however, in capturing a decadent, bohemian spirit pulsing through a country on the verge of massive social reform.

The story zeroes in on Lorca's infatuation with Dalí and the collapse of their relationship when Dalí rejects Lorca as a lover. Dalí’s diaries play down the notion they were ever intimate, but here screenwriter Philippa Goslett maintains that they had a brief, fumbling tryst. Beltrán gives a wonderfully moving turn as Lorca, his longing for Dalí weighing him down like an anchor. When they reunite after years apart, Lorca's sense of despair is palpable as he sees that his old friend is now a twitchy bourgeois teetering on the edge of madness. Remarkably this is Beltrán's first movie role, and he delivers an effortless performance that should open plenty of doors for him.

Pattinson has to work hard to overcome his teen idol tag, but acquits himself well with a solid Spanish accent and dials into just about the right level of googly-eyed weirdness to keep his Dalí credible. It's only elements out of his control that let him down, such as a selection of bad wigs and the comic reveal of him wearing the famous tweaked moustache. And goodness knows what Twilighters will think of the scene where he masturbates while watching Lorca have sex! It might be frolicky and slightly frivolous, but Little Ashes's Entourageian take on the lives of Spain's artistic elite has a fiery passion and some fine central performances.


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