While the names of Federico Garcia Lorca, Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel are familiar to anyone with an interest in modern literature and the visual arts, their personal histories are less widely known than those of artists of comparable stature from Northern Europe. Little Ashes claims to tell the trio’s story, beginning with their years as fashionable undergraduates in Madrid and tracing their emergence as leading artistic figures in the period preceding the rise of General Francisco Franco and the execution of Garcia Lorca. Though the subject matter is interesting, director Paul Morrison seems uncertain about what story he wants to tell and how he wants to tell it.
The film opens with the arrival of the self-consciously artistic Dali at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, where Garcia Lorca and Bunuel are already established as members of the university’s artistic avant-garde. Robert Pattinson, who has attained a cult-like teenage girl following for his roles in the Harry Potter and Twilight series, is clearly intended to provide the eye candy, and even manages to deliver a realistic portrayal of the newcomer’s mixture of arrogance and diffidence amidst the self-assured, if occasionally tortured, Garcia Lorca and Bunuel.
Unfortunately, Pattinson can do little else with the complexities of Dali’s character, and consequently appears a child among grown-ups, especially when compared to Javier Beltran’s nuanced interpretation of Garcia Lorca’s growing awareness of his homosexuality. Beltran’s portrayal of Garcia Lorca strives for the muted elegance and bitterness of Merchant Ivory Productions’ 1987 film Maurice, with which it shares many thematic similarities. In addition to the complexities of juxtaposing Dali and Garcia Lorca’s tentative progression towards a homosexual relationship with Spain’s spiral into violent and intolerant fascism, Morrison also attempts to examine the trio’s artistic work.
Unfortunately, this exploration of the aesthetic is mostly window dressing and does not serve any real purpose. The film also fails in its use of language. Little Ashes is an English film about Spanish artists and, to provide the proper local color, all characters speak in rather ridiculous Castilian-accented English, with Pattinson’s attempts sometimes verging on caricature. Readings of Garcia Lorca’s poetry, which play a prominent role in the film, are delivered in Spanish with an English voice-over, a particularly clumsy way of presenting poetry in another language. Moreover, the readings are not even well integrated into the story. Sporadic imagery from Dali’s paintings feels similarly out of place, and the inclusion of the famous eyeball-slicing scene from the Dali-Bunuel collaboration, An Andalusian Dog, is clearly no more than a ham-handed attempt at shock tactics. Additionally, Morrison fails to adequately delve into the political and cultural forces driving the prevailing mood of iconoclasm, content to rely on throwaway images of fascist atrocities and caricatures of stuffy old art professors in their oak paneled rooms. Little Ashes is instead more interested in the theme of romantic betrayal and the ensuing rift between Garcia Lorca and Dali, an estrangement partly engineered, according to Morrison, by Bunuel. Little Ashes gives these romantic entanglements precedent over compelling storylines such as Dali’s betrayal of his own genius and the motivation behind the execution of the politically neutral Garcia Lorca.
As such, while Little Ashes engages in a constant struggle to break out of the category of gay interest film and make a credible stab at being a serious biopic, it never quite achieves its goal.
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