Erotic tension builds between poet Federico Garcia Lorca and artist Salvador Dali from the first few minutes of Little Ashes. Dalí arrives in a foppish outfit amidst the genteel university suits worn by the 1920s college students. He is immediately marked as different, but different enough to be intriguing to the intellectual elite of the university. Dalí arrives in shyness but eventually grows into his overt eccentricities throughout the film, and you see the evolution of his iconic mustache.
1920s Spain is also building in its fascist overtones, assigning ten years of hard labor to anyone found "maricone," or homosexual. Between eroticism and brutality, Lorca and Dalí have a sometimes tender, sometimes masochistic affair. But this film is mostly seen through the romantic gaze of Lorca, and the romanticism outweighs the acts of brutality the occurs on the sidelines with the massacre of a village by Lorca's town called into view by his frequent poetry recitals. Dalí is another story, often preferring to build and then destroy his art and his relationships out of a sense of the grandiose or a desire to go further so he could be remembered.
The film is more Lorca than Dalí, and thus all the university students are beautiful men who are sometimes hard to distinguish from each other. Lorca was a homosexual while Dalí was ambivalent. The film is also Lorca in the poetry of its images, often nostalgic and lingering compositions of light and shadow and throbbing movement. The actor who plays Lorca has a sweet and vulnerable innocence, he is the perfect lover. However the poetic musings he and others have often seem inspired but out of place, disconnected from the world that we and the characters live in. The film might have done a better job of connecting Lorca to his time and his place and the backdrop of upheaval just under the surface. As is much of what Lorca represents seems to be an air.
Robert Pattinson as Dalí is an odd choice. He is rather too beautiful for his part. But Pattinson does give a multi-dimensional performance as Dalí, often looking to be on the verge of nervous breakdown or a fit of mania. Pattinson does well as a young perhaps gay lover but is less convincing as an older and successful Dalí. However overall Pattinson does not disappoint, even though his portrayal of Dalí brooks something of disenchantment with the artist later in the film. Then Dalí as the character seems both attention-seeking and uncharismatic, and Lorca does indeed seem too good for him.
7/10 for being a complex film with good acting and a lovely kind of tenderness from the actor who plays Lorca. The images and the words and the actors are all beautiful, however there is a sense of too much beauty and too little to connect one idea to the next to leave a full and lasting impression. And also the romance between the two leads are rather wished for than known, it seems like. However do watch this film for its gorgeous imagery and for a unique performance by Pattinson, as well as an introduction to the type of mood apparent in 1920s Spain regarding issues like homosexuality.
