Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
I’m actually going to bed early tonight because my head hurts. It’s a blinding, piercing headache, and it’s all David Lynch’s fault. I saw MULHOLLAND DRIVE tonight, and... dear god... just trying to process it is like trying to chew an entire cut of prime rib at one time. Too much. Too much.
Leave it to Beaks to sort things out for you on this and a fistful of other titles he’s seen at the still-unfolding New York Film Festival.
Okay, folks, in the interest of playing catch-up after a week of steady filmgoing, here are three reviews: two triumphs, and one massive disappointment from a great filmmaker.
MULHOLLAND DRIVE (d. & w. David Lynch)
“It’s been a very strange day.”
Bear with me; MULHOLLAND DRIVE has just happened – really the most apt descriptive – to me for the first time, and I’m still making sense of it all. While it may take another viewing to fully work out just what the hell happens in this flick, there’s no denying that Lynch has made a ferocious return to mind-bending form – following the intermittently inspired train wreck that was LOST HIGHWAY – with an ineffable triumph fully deserving of its stature as the Centerpiece of this year’s New York Film Festival.
After an insanely giddy opening image of jitterbugging couples bopping about the screen, Lynch cuts to a POV shot of someone stumbling about a bedroom, their breathing labored as they make it to a red-sheeted bed, and collapse into the pillow; thus, thrusting us into a nighttime image of a limousine snaking its way through the hills of Los Angeles as Angelo Badalamenti’s ominous score envelops us in the dark, almost doleful tone that will hang over the film throughout. Is the descent into the pillow signaling the beginning of a dream? While the film adheres to a kind of nightmare logic – never more frightening than an early, back alley encounter with a ghoul-like homeless person, all the more confounding for the fact that it introduces us to characters who generally don’t figure into the rest of the film – Lynch is forever casting doubt into the viewer’s mind as to who the dreamer is, and whether or not they might represent two conflicting incarnations of the same being (just one of many possibilities). This movie is so wide open to interpretation, one recalls a bit from the erstwhile sketch comedy troupe, The State, wherein a pseudo-intellectual embarks upon a marathon deconstruction of PARIS, TEXAS. As with all Lynch films, discerning the significant from the purposefully ambiguous will require more than one viewing.
As everyone knows by now, MULHOLLAND DRIVE began life as an proposed television series for ABC, but never made it beyond the pilot episode. Luckily, Studio Canal is run by madman, so they handed Lynch another wad of cash, and asked him to expand the pilot to a feature film. Lynch responded by focusing on three of the show’s main characters, jettisoning all but the briefest glimpses of recognizable character actors who would’ve filled out the series with plenty of TWIN PEAKS-esque quirks – Robert Forster, Dan Hedaya and Brent Briscoe chief among them – but, and this is key, remaining faithful to the pilot’s conventional narrative until a jarring shift 3/4th’s of the way in effectively coldcocks us, sending us scrambling back in our memories to the film’s opening moments to work out the larger meaning of all this lunacy. What sets this apart from the similarly brain-scrambling LOST HIGHWAY is that it all miraculously fits together. Kind of. I think. Did I mention I need to see this again?
The plot, happily, isn’t too taxing to recount, as it’s merely a convoluted variation on the old good-girl-corrupted-by-Hollywood tale. As already mentioned, the film, pared down to its essence, has two protagonists: bubbly blonde Betty (Naomi Watts), a good-hearted, aspiring actress just off a plane from Deep River, Ontario; and Rita (Laura Harring), the amnesiac brunette survivor of a terrible car wreck, who invents her name thanks to a movie poster for GILDA, which featured the Rita. The two are improbably brought together, but quickly bond, setting out to find Rita’s true identity.
Meanwhile, in the excessively scuzzy film industry, there’s Adam, an arrogant, hot-tempered young director battling with some shadowy underworld-connected producers awfully hot to further the career of a young ingenue named Camilla Rhodes. Though Adam initially resists their pressuring, he is later summoned to meet with The Cowboy – a mysterious, monosyllabic albino with a serious western fetish – who commands Adam, upon seeing Camilla’s audition, to proclaim “this is the girl.” (Furthermore, the Cowboy is also given to portentous pronouncements such as “you will see me one more time if you do good; you will see me two more times if you do bad.”)
If it seems Lynch is setting the groundwork for an arsenic-laced valentine to a town that has never quite known what to do with him, well….. that’s part of it. Matters veer from show-biz to whoa-biz, though, once the gals take a long-enough break from sleuthing to bed down with each other. Then, they’re off to a run-down theater situated in a back-alley suffused with sinister blue light, where they are regaled by a torch singer warbling a Spanish-language rendition of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” (instantly recalling Dean Stockwell’s showstopping lip-synch of the falsettoed master’s “In Dreams” in BLUE VELVET). Almost immediately, the girls are emotionally pulverized by the performance, leading them to open a mysterious blue box that has suddenly materialized in Rita’s purse (for which they’ve had an until-then useless blue key all along).
What happens next, quite simply, is hard to describe, harder to fully comprehend, and best left for the viewer to discover on their own. Essentially, identities are shifted, while earlier scenes are reenacted, suggesting the characters may be stuck in some inexplicable loop that somehow ties back into the identity of one Diane Selwyn. For some viewers, this will prove not only puzzling, but frustrating and unsatisfying, as it discards the heretofore adhered to classical narrative structure in favor of fragments that hang together tenuously as dream logic. For Lynch fans, however, and those with a taste for the genuinely surreal, it marks a quasi-departure for the filmmaker, possessing a thematic coherence lacking in his work since BLUE VELVET.
Technically, the film is a marvel. Peter Demming’s cinematography has an absurdly soft glow in daylight, but his most notable achievement is the way he renders darkness as an inescapably malevolent character. No one been this at home in the shadows since Gordon Willis. Meanwhile, Lynch lends this darkness a kind of voice through his sound design; a low, ominous rumble accompanies even the quietest moments, and seems ever on the verge of an abrupt crescendo to a roar. Consider yourself forewarned that Lynch is more than happy to kick the volume up to some frighteningly high-decibel levels (it’s his best use of sound since his perennially underrated TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME).
Yes, MULHOLLAND DRIVE is not for all tastes; it’ll be anathema for hard-core narrative junkies, and will send the faint-of-heart scrambling for the exits within the first ten minutes. For everyone else, it’s classic Lynch – perversely funny and unspeakably terrifying in near equal measures. To be precise, a masterpiece.
TIME OUT (d. Laurent Cantet, w. Robin Campillo, Cantet)
Vincent (Aurelien Recoing) is a dedicated white-collar drone, forever on the road, traveling from one crucial business meeting to another, while keeping in touch with his family via cell phone, calling only to inform them that something else has come up, and that he won’t be home as planned. This is all a facade. In reality, Vincent lost his job several months ago, due precisely to this kind of itinerant behavior born out of a disaffection with a crushingly dull and depressingly pointless middle management position. Strangely, though, Vincent, rather than following up on job leads from a former co-worker, relishes his newfound freedom, driving aimlessly through the French countryside, and sleeping in his car rather than returning home, where his unavoidable financial responsibility to his family will surely intrude upon his semi-blissful existence.
Vincent can’t avoid his domestic obligations forever, though, and when he does come home, he buckles under the penetrating eyes of his wife and well-to-do parents, informing them that he has left his job for another, far more lucrative – if vague – position elsewhere. He works out the details later by visiting a random office building where he eavesdrops on meetings and acquires a copy of the company’s brochure. This lie, however, can only serve as a cover for so long without money; ergo, he arranges to borrow a substantial sum of money from his parents for an office in Switzerland, along with contacting an old school chum with an investment opportunity grounded firmly in fantasy. When this latter scheme unravels fairly quickly, Vincent is approached by a stranger named Jean-Michel (Serge Livrozet), who has been listening in on his investors meetings held at a local hotel lounge. He offers Vincent a tangible means of paying back his friends through importing cheap knock-off watches and clothing, and while Vincent initially finds this distasteful, he has little choice but to get involved, if only to keep the proverbial wolves far enough from the door so as not to alarm his family.
While it would seem Vincent is single-mindedly bent on self-destruction, he’s really suffering from a kind of white-collar anxiety brought on by the unfulfilling nature of his work, which is why, perhaps, he chooses to incorporate the UN angle to his fantasy, giving it the veneer of a semi-noble cause. How Vincent is able to reconcile this with the sheer immorality of his scheming renders him all the more complex. Wisely, Cantet recognizes Vincent’s despairing duplicity cannot be adequately articulated or justified (the film’s suspense is derived chiefly from the fact that we’re never entirely sure what’s going on in his head), leaving it to Recoing to flesh out the character with subtle gestures and restrained expressions. Recoing responds brilliantly, internalizing Vincent’s misery, while maintaining a blank expressiveness that alternately suggests an alarming cool and deer-in-headlights panic. It’s a towering performance of quiet agony, announcing Recoing as an actor of astonishing resourcefulness.
Whereas Cantet keeps the drama emotionally inert, Joceyln Pook’s score is all heartbreak – a funeral dirge for the passing of the last vestiges of Vincent’s freedom. Through the beautifully composed, legato sadness evoked by Pook’s string quartet, Cantet appears to be suggesting that this is Vincent’s final, futile rebellion against professional obligation, and that once he is extricated from this mess, he is in for the long haul, doomed to push papers to the grave – a point driven home by the film’s final scene, where Vincent’s imminent hiring by yet another ambiguous corporation reads like a death sentence on his ever-blank visage.
To date, TIME OUT is without distribution (HUMAN RESOURCES was distributed by The Shooting Gallery, which folded this year), a shame since its themes of professional disillusionment are so timely in this bleak economic atmosphere. There are probably thousands of Vincent’s out there – men and women stuck in that brutal middle-management loop with no sense of escape, and little self-worth. It is Cantet’s greatest triumph that he gives their heretofore satirized predicament a sobering, mournful voice.
THE LADY AND THE DUKE (d. & w. Eric Rohmer, adapted from Grace Elliott’s memoirs Journal of My Life During the French Revolution)
Eric Rohmer, arguably one of our greatest living directors, finally had to scratch that DV itch, and it’s to his credit that he didn’t do it in hackneyed, Dogme fashion. Shooting his actors against a blue-screen, and adding in painted backgrounds based on 18th Century engravings, Rohmer has ended up with an ugly, ungainly marriage of annoyingly artificial form and resoundingly listless content. It’s dispiriting to see Rohmer going through the dull paces of straightforward historical fiction without bothering to spike the drama with his characteristically sharp wit. And while the story of Grace Elliot’s affair and subsequent platonic relationship with the Duke of Orleans, as set against the French Revolution, is potentially intriguing, Rohmer’s staging never rises above common costume drama, rendering his film ultimately indistinguishable from the most unimaginative Merchant/Ivory productions.
Lots more on the way, including Cuaron’s Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN, Cahine’s SILENCE… WE’RE ROLLING and Breillat’s FAT GIRL.
Faithfully submitted,
Mr. Beaks
”Anathema for hard-core narrative junkies.” Yeah... that about sums it up. I’m going to try to find the words. But not tonight. Not tonight...
"Moriarty" out.
