Dalíland
Description
It’s best to depict egomaniacs, even talented ones like Salvador Dalí (Ben Kingsley, gloriously chewing scenery), through the eyes of someone in their orbit but not their headspace. Someone like art-school dropout James (Christopher Briney), a handsome young man working for an NYC gallery in the mid-’70s who is asked to deliver money to Dalí and his wife Gala (an imperious Barbara Sukowa) and is soon swept into their world of parties filled with beautiful people and copious substances. Director Mary Harron is the perfect director for this subject matter, with an unerring eye for period detail and novel ways of looking at real celebrities from various cultural zeitgeists. Newcomer Briney deftly portrays the wide-eyed, game-for-anything James while Kingsley and Sukowa lay bare the roots of an obsessive and dysfunctional marriage between two extraordinary narcissists.
A Tribute to Mary Harron + “Dalíland”
Fri, Apr 14 at 8:30 pm PT at CGV San Francisco
Join us for a special Awards Presentation and conversation with filmmaker Mary Harron. Click here to purchase tickets.
Trailer
Biographies
Before she went into filmmaking, Mary Harron wrote for Punk magazine and interviewed the Sex Pistols, the first journalist to do so for an American publication. She later worked as a producer for a PBS series, Edge (1991). Her first feature, I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), debuted at Cannes and was nominated for a Best First Feature Film Independent Spirit Award. Among her other films are American Psycho (2000), The Notorious Bettie Page (2005), The Moth Diaries (2011), and the miniseries Alias Grace (2017).