Mulholland Drive [RSC Film Club 23]

[LimeGreenLegend 4,175]

The month of November in the film club belongs to the legendarily strange director David Lynch, our second taste of his filmography after Dune.  However, the winning film for this month is a much more Lynchian work that truly represents his style and the themes that he returns to in a lot of his work.  @djw180and @Con both nominated a trip into the unsettling and dreamy world of Mulholland Drive.

Mulholland Drive is a surreal neo-noir mystery that tells the tale of Betty, played by Naomi Watts, a young actress just arrived in LA and Rita, played by Laura Harring, who has become an amnesiac after a brutal car crash.  When their paths cross life starts to get very weird for Betty, leading to an ending that people are still trying to interpret and make sense of nearly twenty years later.  There are several other story threads in this film, some of which last only one scene and are never refenced again, but the main support comes from Justin Theroux who plays a director, Adam, who is being coerced into casting a woman he doesn't want in his film and whose wife is banging Billy Ray Cyrus.  

This is a dense and enigmatic film that you won't make much sense of on the first, or even second viewing, but the clues are all there.  Lynch isn't one to do something randomly, even though it seems like it sometimes.  Everything he shows us has a meaning and he gives us all of the tools to try to work it out.  This is the middle part of a loosely connected trilogy, Lost Highway and Inland Empire being the first and last chapters, so if you like this I highly recommend checking those out too,  but this is arguably the best of the three and maybe the best film from one of the most unique and revered directors in film history.

it'll be just like in the movies, we'll pretend to be someone else

[djw180 6,836]

Mullholland Drive

I saw this at the cinema on release. When I came out I thought I don't understand everything that happened there, but that was a great film. I've watched it on DVD a few times since and I think it's one of the most re-watchable films ever made, both because it's such a great film and because of there are still things I am not sure I understand or my understanding changes on each re-watch. Such as I still don't fully understand the relevance of the scary homeless man behind the diner or the mysterious film financiers who are so insistent on who the leading actress is. I suspect we are not meant to understand everything. As Naomi Watts says in an interview included on the DVD I have, you should not try to work out what you think David Lynch was trying to say, just watch it and whatever you take from it that is fine.

 

It's got a great cast, especially Naomi Watts as aspiring actress Betty and Justin Theroux as director Adam, and a great director, all on top form. Being a David Lynch film you should not of course expect a simple plot. It's got very stylish and classy characters in places, but not over-the-top and is also filled with relatively normal, down-to-Earth characters as well. The plot is fantastic and has some very memorable scenes for me.

 

There is no point in me trying to explain the plot. Others may be able to, but I would have to describe the entire film. Basically a woman (later taking the name Rita) loses her memory, ends up sharing an apartment with Betty who loves playing detective trying to find out who Rita really is. But there is so much more going on in many scenes that, at first, don't seem connected. Ultimately we discover the truth and that nothing was quite as it seemed originally. One of the things I really like is you could almost watch each scene on it's own or in any order and still enjoy them. Many scenes seem to stand on their own, they don't necessarily need the rest of the film.

 

You'll need to have seen it to understand this but bits I really like include the build up to the disgusting coffee, Adam's very calm revenge on his cheating wife, the world's most incompetent hit man (ends up having to kill 3 people instead of 1 trying to set the crime scene to look like a suicide, and then accidently set's fire to the crime scene) and Betty's audition with the creepy older actor. But the best scene for me has to when Betty and Rita go to the Silencio Night Club and hear a haunting a-cappella version, in Spanish, of Roy Orbison's Crying. It's just after this that the plot starts to reveal the true story – although as I said at the outset, you may not understand it all on first, or even subsequent, viewings.

 

One of my all time favourite films, obviously 10/10.