Little Ashes

Buñuel (Matthew McNulty) gets sidelined in deference to his pal and roommate García Lorca (Javier Beltrán) and the latter's infatuation with Dalí (Robert Pattinson, prior to his teen-icon breakthrough in Twilight). Though several years younger than the others, Dalí already cuts a figure at once outré and coy. Buñuel helps style him for celebrity status, and as Little Ashes notes in passing, the two of them would co-create the still-astonishing film Un Chien Andalou a few years later in Paris. But the main show is the growing besottedness of Dalí and García Lorca, which leads to, among other things, a silvery-moonlit clinch during an offshore swim that churns the seawater into a milky froth. Spanish TV actress Marina Gatell contributes heat and passion as García Lorca's supposed girlfriend, especially during an, uh, two-and-a-half-way sex scene. Otherwise, like the guys' amour fou, the movie comes up short. Low-budget is okay as long as filmmakers have some poetry in them, but Paul Morrison's stilted direction fails to conceal that, say, during a simple dialogue scene in a bar there's nobody and nothing else going on outside of camera range. The cast wear their period costumes as if playing dress-up, and the dialogue--in English--is variously delivered by British players affecting "Cathtilian ack-thents" and Spanish actors whose real accents are sometimes impenetrable. Still more irksome is the switch to Spanish whenever García Lorca declaims one of his poems. Or perhaps that's just a Surrealist touch. --Richard T. Jameson