...
home | art & architecture | books & cds | dance | destinations | film | opera | television | theater | archives
...
home
| art & architecture | books & cds | dance
| destinations | film | opera | television | theater | archives
|
||
|
||
See also - Scott Von Doviak's review of
the Mulholland Drive television pilot
The story so
far: filmed in 1999 as a two-hour pilot for a proposed weekly series, Mulholland Drive was rejected by ABC, the network
that had commissioned it. Destined for the
primetime junk heap, Mulholland was rescued by
an infusion of cash from French financiers Studio Canal Plus, allowing Lynch to shoot
enough additional footage to expand the episode into a feature film.
Much
of the pilot remains intact. On L.A.'s twisty
Mulholland Drive, a dark-haired beauty (Laura Elena Harring) narrowly escapes with her
life from a car accident that renders her an amnesiac.
She hides out in an aging actress's vacant apartment, but is discovered in
the shower by Betty (Naomi Watts), the tenant's naive, cheery niece from Deep River,
Ontario. Taking the name "Rita"
from a poster of Rita Hayworth, the mystery woman teams with Betty in an attempt to
discover her true identity. Meanwhile,
Betty's quest for movie stardom intersects with brooding filmmaker Adam Kesher's
opus-in-progress, which is overseen by a conspiracy of malevolent oddballs functioning as
a sort of shadow Hollywood. (This is no doubt exactly how David Lynch thinks show business
is run, and who knows, he may be right.) As
their investigation leads them closer to the truth, Betty and Rita grow closer emotionally
as well.
It's anyone's
guess where the weekly televised version of this story was intended to lead, but it's a
safe bet that the explicit, highly-charged lesbian love scene that follows was not in the
cards. Arriving roughly ninety minutes into the
film, this steamy interlude heralds the point of departure from the previously filmed
material. The final act of Mulholland Drive (if you can even call it a
traditional "act" - screenwriting guru Syd Field will probably drop dead of a
massive stroke if he ever sets eyes on this thing) reconfigures all the events and
characters of the preceding two hours, turning the movie into a double-sided jigsaw
puzzle, albeit one with a few pieces missing. At
the same time, the film as a whole serves as a re-tooling of Lynch's entire back catalogue
of obsessions. The giant, billowing red
curtains that marked the dark divide between shifting levels of reality in Twin Peaks perform the same function here when the
girls pay a visit to the nightmarish after-hours cabaret Silencio - which in turn calls to
mind The Slow Club of Blue Velvet. The identity transference and temporal slippage of
Lost Highway are likewise
revisited, to much greater effect this time.
In his continuing exploration of
these recurring themes and motifs, Lynch leaves himself open to the tiresome charge that
he is a man out of ideas, making the same movie over and over again. And yet the last word that would ever spring to
mind when describing Mulholland Drive is
"predictable." Though we can
probably guess, in a very general way, that Lynch will take us on a journey from seeming
normality to full-blown phantasmagoria, the detours along the way are constantly
surprising and outrageously entertaining. Does
it all add up? Is there one satisfying
explanation for the events that unfold? Several
interpretations suggest themselves on first viewing, at least one of which is perfectly
simple, but none of them seem to take into account all that we've seen transpire. What are we to make of the monstrous trash entity
glimpsed in the alley behind a Denny's-like restaurant?
Or the cryptic blue key and the device it unlocks? Or the supremely creepy old couple Betty
encounters several times, to her mounting horror? This
is a movie that cries out for multiple viewings, but ultimately resists all rational
explanations.
As usual,
Angelo Badalamenti supplies a moody, idiosyncratic score - by turns mournful, ominous and
whimsical as required. And as with Sheryl Lee
in Fire Walk With Me, a young and relatively
unknown blonde starlet is revealed as a striking, powerful performer. In my review of the original pilot, I wrote that
Naomi Watts "shows signs of darker impulses beneath her cornpone veneer." This proves to be an understatement when applied
to the feature film version; whether playing wholesome and adorable or bitter and
vengeful, Watts is equally convincing.
If there was ever a movie to throw the shallowness, the bare
minimal competence, the utter bankruptcy of imagination in contemporary Hollywood into
sharp relief, Mulholland Drive is it. Lynch's mastery of all elements of sight and sound
is absolute; his tonal control impeccable; his ability to navigate dangerous, murky
emotional currents and conjure moments of heart-freezing dread out of thin air
unparalleled. And it's high time - in fact,
long past time - for this singular artist to get his due from the naysayers, the
namby-pamby critical establishment, and especially from the gutless bottom-liners who
control the purse-strings of the film industry. What
does it say about our culture that one of the most inspired, fertile creative talents of
our age must time and time again turn to France for funding? Nothing good, that's for damn sure. David Lynch is the sandman of American cinema,
and Mulholland Drive is his most mesmerizing
dreamscape yet.
- Scott Von Doviak
