In the early 1920s, three Spanish geniuses happened to occupy the same
dormitory in a university in Madrid. Federico Garcia Lorca was a great
poet and political activist. Salvador Dali was one of the century's
foremost painters. Luis Buñuel was Spain's
greatest filmmaker. The three became friends during their college years
and formed extremely complicated relationships that would continue into
adulthood in one form or another. They were actually quite a mismatched
trio. Buñuel was a cynic and a hard-nosed
pragmatist who would sometimes expose an ugly side of his character.
Garcia Lorca was an elegant idealist with smooth social skills. Dali was
an awkward and eccentric outsider who showed up in school looking like
Oscar Wilde or perhaps like Gainsborough's Blue Boy, right down to the
page-boy hair cut.
Given the presence of three such lions in one place when they were all
but cubs, and given an odd mix of sexual proclivities, there is a natural
human curiosity about what they did and said in those days, and that's
what the script of Little Ashes is about. As portrayed here, their
friendships ebbed and flowed, and the eventual dynamic which developed
between them was determined to a large extent by their sexuality. Garcia
Lorca was a homosexual, Luis Buñuel was a
homophobe, Dali was flexible and/or confused. In fact, Dali and Lorca had
a homoerotic and sometimes very romantic relationship that apparently
stopped just short of intercourse because Dali was afraid of that side of
his nature, or perhaps because he ultimately realized that it did not
really exist.
The problem with Little Ashes is not the quality of the production, but
the fact that it's an arthouse film with extremely limited commercial
appeal. I'll illustrate that claim by describing what might be the most
important scene in the film. There is a lovely and aggressive woman in
love with Garcia Lorca, who is in turn in love with Dali, who will not
have sex with him. The woman bursts into Lorca's dorm room, determined to
have sex with him. She sees Dali there, but proceeds undaunted. Lorca
allows himself to be seduced, but keeps his eyes entirely on Dali as he
rolls around with the woman. For his own part, Dali watches and
masturbates. We are not sure whether Dali is excited by the man, the
woman, or simply by the act of passion, but he manages to climax just as
Lorca does. You can probably imagine that this scene is not going to play
to packed houses in your local mall theater, especially since it includes
some very graphic camera angles. It will appeal most strongly to indie
film lovers who are very interested in history and literature, and who are
extremely tolerant of or interested in male-male kissing.
I didn't have any problem with the film's explicitness, and I'm
interested in the subject matter, but I was disappointed by Little Ashes.
I found the script too unfocused to deliver any significant emotional
impact or intellectual stimulus. While the film has moments that I found
interesting and thoughtful, and I enjoyed the musical score of flamenco
guitar and sad violins, I walked away from the film wondering why it was
made in the first place. It just doesn't seem to have any point, and it
can be deadly dull. It's just a rambling character study. You may be
wondering whether it is at least an accurate character study, given that
it deals with three important historical characters. I honestly don't know
whether the great artists have been presented fairly. It's the kind of
film which may or may not be accurate, by which I mean that the
conversations are not based on the autobiographies or journals of the
three men, so all the dialogue consists of speculative imaginings. On the
other hand, none of those speculations contradict anything we know for a
fact. Insiders have had mixed reactions. Luis Buñuel's
family has not been satisfied with the way he is portrayed here, but those
with expertise in the lives of Dali and Lorca seem reasonably comfortable
with the way this film styles them and their relationship.
The film has attracted more attention than it normally would have
because the actor playing Dali became quite a major heartthrob in his next
movie. That actor would be Robert Pattinson, and the film which made him
famous is the vampire romance called Twilight. In Little Ashes, Pattinson
was part of a mixed Spanish/English cast. Of the four main characters, two
are played by Spanish actors speaking English with Spanish accents and the
other two (including Pattinson) are English actors mimicking Spanish
accents. Having good Spanish represented by bad English was an odd choice
of conventions, and rendered the film more artificial than it needed to
be. It also made the dialogue more inaccessible, because the accents can
sometimes be hard to understand. That convention is disrupted for Lorca's
poetry. When the bard is reciting his verses, he switches to Spanish, but
the words are simultaneously translated into an English overdub, also in
his voice. This allows, or requires, the audience to listen to both audio
streams and separate them. It's awkward. One feels that the script would
have been better served if it had been performed in Spanish with English
subtitles, or by using good English to represent good Spanish. On the
other hand, that's a minor point because that sort of change would not
have made this film commercially viable.
