Filmmaker David Lynch enjoys messing with our
minds as he explores his own fascination with the psychic
collision of dreams and reality and the elasticity of time.
His newest film, "Mulholland Drive," is more akin to "Lost
Highway" than "Blue Velvet," and this time the location of
Lynch's film world is specific. It's set in Los Angeles, where
idealistic young actresses arrive with fantasies of stardom
and directors try to make art while sinister money men pull
strings from shadowy offices.
Lynch's themes are clearer than usual, but the movie itself
is as strange, fascinating, erotic, creepy and goofy as "Twin
Peaks." Yes, there is a mysterious dwarf, as well as bizarre
hallucinations and a lesbian love affair.
The movie opens with a carefree jitterbug contest and then
moves to the image of a pillow and the sounds of troubled
sleep -- someone is having a nightmare. From there, the camera
shifts to a bird's-eye view of a limousine gliding as silently
as a hearse along a curvy canyon road at night. Composer
Angelo Badalementi's score creates an ominous atmosphere that
deepens the viewer's sense of anxiety. The feeling is proven
right when an explosive crash occurs soon after.
"Mulholland Drive" follows the search for identity by Rita
(Laura Elena Harring), an exotic victim of amnesia who emerges
from the accident, and the disillusionment of Betty (Naomi
Watts), a sunny, trusting blonde who arrives in L.A. from
Canada and finds Rita in her aunt's house.
Lynch can transform an ordinary place or object into
something of unbearable dread. He also has an ironic sense of
humor easily missed by the literal-minded. For example, Lynch
gives us a spectacular shot of Los Angeles, but the view is
accompanied by a hollow sound like the emptiness of an
abandoned room.
The movie originated as a
television pilot but was rejected because it was too slow and
bewildering. It's still both, but I imagine it works much
better as a continuous dream reverie than as a show with
commercial breaks.
The first half unreels in a linear way, but the last,
confounding hour puts the first half in doubt. Betty appears
to have exchanged identities with a woman named Diane and is
crushed to see Rita, who has now become a sexpot named
Camilla, engaged in an affair with a director (Justin
Theroux).
Could it be that the naive Betty is Diane's idealized
version of herself? Is Lynch telling us that in Hollywood
young women are interchangeable? Clearly, this is a place
where innocence is lost to ambition and selfless love replaced
by selfish desire for celebrity.
Like the recent movie "Memento," Lynch's movie toys with
the past, present and future. But unlike "Memento," which can
be reconstructed into a feasible chronology, analysis of
Lynch's will fall more into the psychological realm than
logical reality.
Lynch has a gift for manipulating light and dark, illusion
and reality. His movie captures the extraordinary brightness
of a California day while leaving us with the shadowy sense of
unease we feel when navigating a city alone at night.
Perhaps most bizarre of all, Kentuckian Billy Ray Cyrus of
"Achy Breaky Heart" fame shows up in a small role as a pool
man who is caught in bed with a director's wife. Now that's
scary.
From www.louisvillescene.com
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