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Film Description
David Lynch's Mulholland Drive provides a memorably dark trip through the flipside of Hollywood.
As ingenue Naomi Watts slowly makes sense of amnesiac moll Laura Elena Harring, on the other side of town, black-clad director Justin Theroux is being pressured by entertainment industry heavies into casting a mystery actress in his new movie. The first hour-and-a-half is as funny and as scary as an episode of Twin Peaks, but in an instant, the characters shuffle roles and we start to watch a film in negative, the flipside of the entertainment industry: perennial losers turn winners, and the once bold and beautiful become overnight tragic heroines. Those who choose to stay outside the dream factory - the pimps, killers and derelicts - remain as they were, untouched by fame.
In David Lynch's most satisfying feast of bizarre surrealism, an attractive young woman, who has lost her memory after a car crash involving gangsters, is taken in and... more >
In David Lynch's most satisfying feast of bizarre surrealism, an attractive young woman, who has lost her memory after a car crash involving gangsters, is taken in and befriended by an equally pretty aspiring actress in L.A. Metamorphosed from an intended TV series, it's an intriguing noirish mystery that slinks and sidles round dark corners, into shady deals, dead ends, oddballs, red herrings and lurking sinster forces; a shifting, bewildering identity-swap conundrum that revels in themes of illusion, reality, acting and film-making itself.
Angelo Badalamenti's superb score, rumbling, soaring, filled with foreboding, furthers the deeply sensual malaise. Ripe for comparisons with Vertigo, Celine and Julie go Boating and Persona, Mulholland Drive's future status is sealed by Naomi Watt's beguiling performance, and three spine-tingling scenes - her seductive audition, a moment of erotic lesbian intimacy, and a cascading Spanish rendition of Roy Orbison's "Crying". Described by critic David Thomson as "one of the greatest films ever made about the cultural devastation caused by Hollywood", it's a remarkable amalgam of Lynchian pre-occupations and the highlight of the decade so far.
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Lynch continues his search for the meaning of structure. It is testament to his great and growing skill that we are satisfied as well as lost in this surreal masterpie... more >
Lynch continues his search for the meaning of structure. It is testament to his great and growing skill that we are satisfied as well as lost in this surreal masterpiece. There is, upon reflection, consistency in the incoherence and method in the madness. Superb. < less
Tony Trebble on 30th September 2002
The notes on “Mulholland Drive” in the latest bulletin, the key to its obscurities (most of them) is that it takes off from Sheridan Le Fanu’s lesbian vampire tale, “C... more >
The notes on “Mulholland Drive” in the latest bulletin, the key to its obscurities (most of them) is that it takes off from Sheridan Le Fanu’s lesbian vampire tale, “Carmilla” in “In a Glass Darkly” (1872 – predates Stoker’s Dracula). The movie calls her “Camilla” Lynch’s adaptation is ingenious and amusing; the tale begins with the crash of a stagecoach, the movie with a car crash; Carmilla’s mother, whose function is to dump her terrible daughter on unsuspecting households, becomes in the movie the mostly unseen aunt of the victim who lends the apartment; both Carmilla and Camilla affect amnesia to gain sympathy and avoid questions; both tale and film are permeated with vampire love (no reflections in mirrors, avoidance of sunlight, moribund victims in agony before themselves becoming vampires); both teem with menacing and unexplained weirdoes and Lynch throws in lots and lots of “homage” to Dreyer’s “Vampyr” (1932) a version of Le Fanu’s tale even more obscure than his. (No reference, as far as I could see, to Vadim’s “Blood and Roses” (1960), also based on “Carmilla”. Nothing obscure about Vadim). Initiates to Mulholland Drive should be told that the film begins with a female vampire being sent on a new assignment by her minders from Hell; and then left to fend for themselves and read the book. < less
Mike McCahill on 6th August 2002
In almost certainly the most uniquely textured film to be set in Los Angeles this year, ingenue Naomi Watts slowly makes sense of amnesiac moll Laura Elena Harring... more >
In almost certainly the most uniquely textured film to be set in Los Angeles this year, ingenue Naomi Watts slowly makes sense of amnesiac moll Laura Elena Harring, while on the other side of town, black-clad director Justin Theroux is being pressured by entertainment industry heavies into casting a mystery actress in his new movie. The first hour-and-a-half is as funny and as scary as an episode of Twin Peaks, but in an instant, the characters shuffle roles and we start to watch a film in negative, the flipside of the entertainment industry: perennial losers turn winners, and the once bold and beautiful become overnight tragic heroines. Only those who choose to stay outside the dream factory - the pimps, killers and derelicts - remain as they were, untouched by fame. A routine criticism of modern American cinema is the lack of decent roles afforded to its women, but Lynch directs Harring and the extraordinary Watts through several interesting variations within the framework of the same or similar characters. You’d have to have a tough heart not to see the tragedy in the failed starlet who leaves behind only an empty stage, and words to the effect that the rest is silence. < less
