UK/Spain: 2008

Director: Paul Morrison

Certificate: 15
 

Little Ashes uses a past era overshadowed by imminent change to frame complex emotions.  Paul Morrison's evocation of the meeting in 1920s Madrid and subsequent tortuous relationship of the young Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel and Federico Garcia Lorca is such a labour of love that you forgive its incongruities.  Chief among these is the  cast's use of Hispanic-accented English where two of the trio are English actors - thus Robert Pattinson's Dalí and Matthew McNulty's Buñuel sound like Englishmen trying to be stage Spaniards, somehow patronising Javier Beltrán's real thing as Lorca. However, Adam Suschitzky's cinematography, contrasting fierce brightness and brooding shadow, provides an apt background for the passion between Lorca and Dalí, while a tormented Buñuel fights his own sexual demons. Add the lovelorn Marina Gatell and Arly Jover, formidable as Dalí's final muse, and you get an Iberian version of the Bloomsburys, only more talented.

Pattinson's cult status from Twilight is evidently no squealing flash in the teenage pan. His Dalí  develops from vulnerable but obstinate outsider to celebrity-seeking narcissist, epitomised by the scene where, hearing of Lorca's death, the grief-stricken artist smears a canvas with black, only to notice how fetching the paint splashes look on him, his sorrow soon forgotten as he preens and poses before the mirror.

Martin Hoyle Financial Times

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