Mulholland Drive (2001)
Directed by David Lynch
Blonde Betty Elms has only just arrived in Hollywood to become a movie star when she meets an enigmatic brunette with amnesia. Meanwhile, as the two set off to solve the second woman's identity, filmmaker Adam Kesher runs into ominous trouble while casting his latest project.
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The plot is a Rubik's Cube of classic Lynchian archetypes culled from the director's entire oeuvre: There's a pair of Hollywood dames at the heart of the story, Betty (Watts), a new arrival to the L.A. basin, who is intent on making her mark in the film world; and the amnesiac Rita (Harring), who takes her name from a Gilda poster because she can't recall her real one.
A poster of Gilda is reflected from a bathroom mirror as the amnesiac adopts more than Hayworth's name.
There are two characters named Betty and Rita who the movie follows through mysterious plot loops, but by the end of the film we aren't even sure they're different characters, and Rita (an amnesiac who lifted the name from a "Gilda" poster) wonders if she's really Diane Selwyn, a name from a waitress' name tag.
The brunette, who quickly adopts the temporary name "Rita" (after Rita Hayworth on a Gilda poster), has lost her memory and seems to be in big trouble.
The latter stumbles down the hillside into Betty's lair, espies a Gilda poster (thus christening herself Ritaas in Rita Hayworth), and the two womenthe ever-optimistic Canadian and the sullenly scared damsel in distressform a fatalistic bond as they begin a feature length investigation attempting to fill in Rita's blank past.
The woman, who eventually calls herself Rita after seeing a poster on the wall for the great romantic film noir Gilda (1946), begs Betty to help her.
I was reminded repeatedly of Ingmar Bergman's Persona , which also examines at close range the relationship between two women, one of them an actress, and which is also awash in reflexive elements that turn its status as cinema back on itself.
Club Silencio leads directly into the latter; the former is shortly preceded by a moment in which Rita's panic causes the film image to double and overlap itself, a rupture of reality as intense as any in the 35 years separating Mulholland Dr. from Ingmar Bergman's Persona .
Rita loses hope, sports a blond wig and Mulholland Drive's women suddenly become one (Persona anyone?).
David Lynch's Mulholland Drive contends that the answer to the eternal struggle between what is real and what is fantasy comes in the form of a Keatsian confusion--it's the difference between Adam's dream and Eve rendered flesh, blurred in the mind of the creator and his audience.A film is a dream of the director made tangible, a conceit familiar from the fourth wall-breaking in Ingmar Bergman's Persona (banishing any mystery there might have been regarding the visual references to that film in Lynch's piece), and a movie's characters therefore become projections of its maker's sublimated longing (clarifying too the auteur's use of wardrobe and colour schemes from Hitchcock's meditation on objectification, Vertigo, as well as those of his first collaboration with inamorata Tippi Hedren, The Birds).
Mr. Lynch's women also hark back to the perfectly coiffed blond heroines of Alfred Hitchcock's ''Vertigo'' and ''Marnie,'' while the music of Angelo Badalamenti, his favorite composer, is a Mannerist echo of Hitchcock's musical main man, Bernard Herrmann.
But its greatest descendant is David Lynch 's Mulholland Drive , another film about two women erotically attached, a house with a secret, and transformation.
It reminded me of my favorite director, Howard Hawks, who remade his masterpiece Rio Bravo (1959) two times -- just because he could and because he knew he could do it well.
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As Betty and Rita begin to unravel the puzzle of what happened the night of Rita's accident, we're introduced to images of a dreamer behind a dumpster, an opening jitterbug that recalls (and subverts) the widow's waltz that opens Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (another film about doubling and personality changes), a rotting corpse of a woman in a filthy apartment, and a little blue box, whose key seems to be the vital element in unravelling the tale.
Consider, for example, a spooky midnight rendezvous up a lonely and deserted Beachwood Drive corral with the "Cowboy" (Lafayette Montgomery), a strange and scary denizen of darkness whose threatening potentials might have been inspired by Kobayashi in "The Usual Suspects" or, even, Roman Polanski's Man with Knife in "Chinatown".
>From its opening credit sequence featuring 1950s American Bandstand-style dancers to its first shots of a limousine snaking through the darkness of the titular road (which also calls to mind the opening sequence of Billy Wilder?s 1950 classic Sunset Boulevard), Mulholland Dr. is staking out its territory as a dreamscape.
But not all dreams make sense, and this is a colorful fever dream of a film, filled with Tinseltown iconography: the "Sunset Boulevard" street scene; the Hollywood letters in the hills; the snappy good-girl presence of Miller, a star from Hollywood's faded Golden Age.
David Lynch's Mulholland Drive contends that the answer to the eternal struggle between what is real and what is fantasy comes in the form of a Keatsian confusion--it's the difference between Adam's dream and Eve rendered flesh, blurred in the mind of the creator and his audience.A film is a dream of the director made tangible, a conceit familiar from the fourth wall-breaking in Ingmar Bergman's Persona (banishing any mystery there might have been regarding the visual references to that film in Lynch's piece), and a movie's characters therefore become projections of its maker's sublimated longing (clarifying too the auteur's use of wardrobe and colour schemes from Hitchcock's meditation on objectification, Vertigo, as well as those of his first collaboration with inamorata Tippi Hedren, The Birds).
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As noir, the movie is silly, with absurdist plot leaps and personality transfers that feel like a dead-zoned spoof of "Vertigo."
David Lynch's Mulholland Drive contends that the answer to the eternal struggle between what is real and what is fantasy comes in the form of a Keatsian confusion--it's the difference between Adam's dream and Eve rendered flesh, blurred in the mind of the creator and his audience.A film is a dream of the director made tangible, a conceit familiar from the fourth wall-breaking in Ingmar Bergman's Persona (banishing any mystery there might have been regarding the visual references to that film in Lynch's piece), and a movie's characters therefore become projections of its maker's sublimated longing (clarifying too the auteur's use of wardrobe and colour schemes from Hitchcock's meditation on objectification, Vertigo, as well as those of his first collaboration with inamorata Tippi Hedren, The Birds).
Mr. Lynch's women also hark back to the perfectly coiffed blond heroines of Alfred Hitchcock's ''Vertigo'' and ''Marnie,'' while the music of Angelo Badalamenti, his favorite composer, is a Mannerist echo of Hitchcock's musical main man, Bernard Herrmann.
Traces of it can be seen in everything from “Basic Instinct” to David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” and countless other thrillers.
"Mulholland Drive" isn't on the same level with "Blue Velvet," Lynch's greatest film and the one that still defines his career.
Accordingly, for every "The Straight Story," there's a "Lost Highway," "Blue Velvet" and even a TV series like "Twin Peaks" thrown in for good measure.
Mulholland Drive is a return to Lynch’s Blue Velvet roots: a dark story of a shady Hollywood underworld.
Time will tell if this one has the staying power of Lynch's most irreplacable work, but Mulholland Dr. is a compelling summation of the director's career to date and his best feature since Blue Velvet.
We know Lynch; we've seen Blue Velvet ; we get that he likes travestying '50s tropes by exaggerating them and filling them full of rot and perversity.
You may leave the theater without the first clue as to what the director of "Eraserhead" and "Blue Velvet" is up to, but in a way that doesn't matter.