Daliland, Mary Harron, 2022

Eccentric, over the top, surreal, excessive, multifaceted, indefinable, undefined, astonishing. It was Dali and it was Dali's world.

An all-round artist who signed in dozens of different ways to make fun of people, always in search of a fourth dimension, capricious and euphoric like a child, madly in love with life, celebrated every moment as an antidote to death, madly in love with women and young and lively men to be treasured and displayed like precious jewels.

Dalì, an artist who spoke of himself in the third person and who, so indefinable, sought the definition of forms in food. The same shapes that, in his paintings, he betrayed and allowed to bend under the impact of time. The time that passed inexorably and from which he and his wife Gala tried to escape, designing around themselves a reality that they inhabited and that went beyond the comprehensible, a surreality suspended like a dream where everything is possible and everything happens beyond the rules and limits.

Where nothing was what it seemed but everything was and happened. Being Dali wasn't easy and intercepting his world was like landing on another planet. A man who, if on the one hand he felt above every artist of his time and little below God, on the other hand knew that for him there was no match compared to the great names of pictorial art of the past and even in this time was his enemy.

Critical and doubtful towards the contemporary art of which he himself was a part, he experienced firsthand the conflict between the brilliant ideas to be translated into painting that came out of the most heated moments of impetuous anger and that form of art that had nothing to say and which defined little more than an ejaculation on the canvas.

Unusual and misunderstood by many, he found in the heart of his beloved Gala (which the poet Paul Éluard had left for Dalì) the form of his own madness, it was "the secret within his secret", there was no Dalì without Gala because, in the ways more unthinkable, she was the origin and end of his entire world, that land of Dalì, Dalìland precisely, from which, after having seen his works, no one returned.

It was difficult for Dali to be Dali because nothing was what it seemed, including himself.

Ben Kinglsey, on the other hand, makes being Dalì seem very easy and, in a standing ovation-worthy performance, he restores in Mary Harron's biopic the indefinite and untranslatable complexity of an artist who today we can rightly say has found a way to defeat time and the formula of eternal youth: he himself, his art, his paintings, his works are the elixir of immortality.