Pio Marmaï in Daaaaaali! (Music Box Films)

If there was ever a current director working today who should be making a film about artist Salvador Dalí, it is French writer/director Quentin Dupieux, practitioner of his own form of deadpan surrealist humor. With Daaaaaalí!, Dupieux twins his particular vision with that of Dalí’s, offering a deliberately incomprehensible but utterly enjoyable film that revels less in Dalí’s paintings, which were vital in smashing the conventions of his time, than in his personality.

If there is anything close to resembling a plot here, it would be about Judith (Anaïs Demoustier), a young pharmacist turned journalist who decides (or is coerced by Dalí) to make his biopic. Judith is also the most normal and relatable person here. The project becomes constantly thwarted by Dalí, who walks away from one shoot because the makeup artist wasn’t listening to his story, as well as her producer Jérôme (Romain Duris), who is entertainingly boorish until he becomes unbearably toxic. From there on, it’s a crapshoot. Dupieux engages five actors to play Dalí, and because of a consistency in tone and some tremendous makeup, you can barely tell the difference, aside from the actor who plays Elder Dalí.

Dupieux has stated that his template for the film was Monty Python. Besides the loose sketch-like structure and a couple of running gags, most of this, though, is pure Dupieux: dry, absurdist, and occasionally screamingly funny. You haven’t seen skeet shooting until you see how Dalí does it here.

Dupieux uses tried and true tricks to create a sense of surrealism that mimics Dalí’s: running film backwards, toying with the audio to make the actors sound vocally off, and a sequence where Dalí seems to take forever to walk down a hall to meet a stationary Judith. But mostly, the weapon here is Dalí’s petulant and overwhelming personality. His life was a sword against the mundane and the bourgeoisie attitudes of the era. Dupieux recognizes this and exploits it. Dalí quits the film that he had promised to make with Judith three times for absolutely illogical reasons. He forces his chauffeur to drive his car on the beach so he doesn’t have to walk to the film location on the sand and also makes the chauffeur and Judith push him in the car when it stalls. He fondles the makeup artist’s breasts, but asks permission before doing so. Additionally, his abode is a Dr. Seuss–style dreamhouse.

All of it adds to an eccentric life and a life lived on no one’s terms and no one’s perception but his own. Yet underneath all the vibrancy is the melancholy of mortality. Early on, Dalí sees his older, wheelchair-bound self in a window. No one else seems to, and it haunts him. It could be inferred that his behavior and his art were a ballast against mortality and a call to live life to the fullest. If Dupieux captures anything in Daaaaaalí!, it is that.