Mulholland Drive
| Year: | 2001 |
| Studio: | Studio Canal/Universal |
| Director: | David Lynch |
| Writer: | David Lynch |
| Cast: | Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring, Robert Forster, Dan Hedaya, Melissa George, Marcus Graham |
Never mellowing to tell a straight story (except for The Straight Story), David Lynch again leaves you wondering if he was just painting a cinematic canvas with no point, or if there's a very specific answer to the mystery and you're just too stupid to work it out.
Clues and talismans are scattered throughout the movie, not one of them obvious, and everything seems thrown out the window at every critical juncture to put a new spin on things.
To describe the plot would be impossible. You can describe what you believed it to mean, but that's all.
A star of some sort (the absolutely stunning Harring) stumbles into a Hollywood apartment block with amnesia. The ever-happy small town aspiring actress (Watts) who moves in makes friends and then falls in love with her as they try to figure out the mystery of who she is and what she's doing with so much money and a strange blue key.
At the same time, a cool young director is told by two shadowy mob-types who to cast in his next film - a girl he doesn't want - and is told to visit 'the cowboy', a very Lynchian character who talks in riddles.
The stories are (apparently) somehow connected, and halfway through everything changes - the characters, their relationships, and personalities - making you think either the first half was all a dream or the second half is.
Throw in a strange, hypnotic nightclub where everything is prerecorded, and two guys sharing a horrible experience at a breakfast café, and you have a David Lynch extravaganza. Maybe you'd get it after ten viewings, maybe not. As always, he seems more interested in look and mood than story.
Watts is incredible as the aspiring starlet, particularly when she morphs into the jaded, jealous, tousled creature she inhabits in the second half. Her performance is so subtle you don't realise the original persona was so crucial to the personality change.
And Harring is a walking wet dream. If you're female, the lesbian sex scene will turn you into one, if you're male it will make you hotter than any porno sequence you've seen all year.
Clues and talismans are scattered throughout the movie, not one of them obvious, and everything seems thrown out the window at every critical juncture to put a new spin on things.
To describe the plot would be impossible. You can describe what you believed it to mean, but that's all.
A star of some sort (the absolutely stunning Harring) stumbles into a Hollywood apartment block with amnesia. The ever-happy small town aspiring actress (Watts) who moves in makes friends and then falls in love with her as they try to figure out the mystery of who she is and what she's doing with so much money and a strange blue key.
At the same time, a cool young director is told by two shadowy mob-types who to cast in his next film - a girl he doesn't want - and is told to visit 'the cowboy', a very Lynchian character who talks in riddles.
The stories are (apparently) somehow connected, and halfway through everything changes - the characters, their relationships, and personalities - making you think either the first half was all a dream or the second half is.
Throw in a strange, hypnotic nightclub where everything is prerecorded, and two guys sharing a horrible experience at a breakfast café, and you have a David Lynch extravaganza. Maybe you'd get it after ten viewings, maybe not. As always, he seems more interested in look and mood than story.
Watts is incredible as the aspiring starlet, particularly when she morphs into the jaded, jealous, tousled creature she inhabits in the second half. Her performance is so subtle you don't realise the original persona was so crucial to the personality change.
And Harring is a walking wet dream. If you're female, the lesbian sex scene will turn you into one, if you're male it will make you hotter than any porno sequence you've seen all year.