Film: Mulholland Drive
Director: David Lynch
Country: USA
Released: May 2001
Runtime: 146 minutes
Genre: Surrealism
Studio: StudioCanal, Les Films Alain Sarde
Influenced: Sofia Coppola, Shane Carruth, Nicolas Winding Refn, Christopher Nolan, Harmony Korine
To summarise, the plot can be broadly understood as a 4-act surreal dream carousel. In the first act, a mysterious car crash on Mulholland Drive leaves an amnesiac woman with nothing but a purse filled with cash and a haunting sense of mystery. She stumbles into an apartment and adopts the name Rita (Laura Harring) and the hunt for her identity begins. Meanwhile, wide-eyed Betty (Naomi Watts), an aspiring actress fresh off the bus from Ontario, arrives in Hollywood, bursting with dreams. In the second act, Betty and Rita team up to unravel the enigma, and their journey turns into a Hollywood fever dream. Auditions, love affairs and chance encounters weave a tapestry of glamour and illusion. In the third act, reality starts to slip way and the plot gets sucked into the vortex of a mysterious blue box. The shot of Betty and Rita getting out of the taxi, and the entire sequence inside Club Silencio, is so gorgeous, so deeply weird and so typically Lynchian all at the same time.
In the fourth act, there's a twist in the tale. Whatever you thought you knew about the characters and their relationships takes a plunge into a narrative rabbit hole. The blurred lines between identity, desire and dreams reach a climax that's as bewildering as it is brilliant. I haven't seen the connection discussed anywhere but, to my mind, the final word of the film ("silencio") echoes the final word of Godard's Le Mépris ("silenzio"). Both films communicate a profound disillusionment with the Hollywood studio system. Lynch depicts Hollywood as a landscape where identities are fluid and personas are crafted. Characters take on different names and roles, blurring the lines between who they are and who they want to be. Also, beneath the glossy surface of Hollywood lies a dark underbelly, and Mulholland Drive delves into the seedy and corrupt aspects of the industry, and moral ambiguities that actors and directors face.
Mulholland Drive received widespread critical acclaim for its enigmatic storytelling, dreamlike atmosphere, haunting score (by Angelo Badalamenti) and magnetic performances. The film won the Best Director award for Lynch at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, and Naomi Watts won the Best Actress award from America's National Society of Film Critics, but surprisingly wasn't nominated for an Oscar. The character of Betty Elms, played by Watts, was originally written for a teenage actress, but Watts convinced Lynch to cast her in the role, and she delivered a breakthrough performance. Every time I watch the film I notice different details, but there is one scene that will stay with me for the rest of my life – the terrifying dream sequence at Winkie's Diner. Apparently, this was an actual dream experienced by the director and, when Lynch shared his dream with the cast and crew, they encouraged him to incorporate it into the film. Something about its dream logic is so real, while it also taps into the movie's core theme – the fear of failure, as embodied by the tramp down the alley.
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