Categories: Reviews

‘Mulholland Drive’ review

Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring star in David Lynch’s cult film.

    In one of the vanishing points of this labyrinth, structured according to an implacable oneiric logic, lies a rotting corpse that reminds the British critic Graham Fuller of that of the actress Marie Prevost, a silent film star who, according to Kenneth Anger in hollywood babylondrowned in bourbon his misfortune of having an accent that did not match his romantic and fragile appearance. Mulholland Drive is, like John Schlesinger’s Like A Plague of Locusts, What happened to Baby Jane?by Robert Aldrich What’s wrong with Helen?by Curtis Harrington Barton Finkby the Coens, or the comic strips by Kim Deitch –especially, Hollywoodland–, a hallucinatory approach to a dream factory that, in reality, packs nightmares into the void. The movie it describes a descent, in a spiral, towards that most earthly manifestation of Hell, disguised as a pseudo-religious mirage, that we call Hollywood.

    in his book The Death Of CinemaPaolo Cherchi Usai writes that cinema is the art of the destruction of the moving image. In some way, every film is a frustrated attempt at transcendence: the mirage of a dream sculpted on perishable material. Mulholland Drive is, essentially, the story of a dream that rots, according to the same fate that condemns the most radiant Technicolor to the corruption of celluloid. Having said this, it can be pointed out that this latest Lynch contains many possible films, between the candor of a police investigation almost in Enid Blyton code and the abstract horror that a dreamlike creature sheltered in an alley could keep in a polysemic cube. It’s also a chilling melodrama of betrayed loves and friendships and a sneering elegy for beleaguered integrity. Revealing the accommodating nature of a cinematographic narrative that is satisfied with playing two notes on an inexhaustible keyboard, the film, in its indescribable final climax, breaks temporal concatenations, identities, handles and linear perceptions, achieving that all the elements of its symphony rhyme, that there is no loose end and that, at the same time, windows of meaning are opened to show, finally, that all the dreams, love stories and illusions of Hollywood end up sleeping the eternal sleep in the bed of Marie Prevost (or Diane Selwyn).

    For those who willingly accept having Lynch climb their skulls.

    The worst: that there are those who call it cryptic.

    DATA SHEET

    Address: David Lynch Distribution: Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring, Justin Theroux, Ann Miller, Robert Forster, Brent Briscoe, Jeannie Bates, Melissa George, Dan Hedaya, Lori Heuring, Billy Ray Cyrus, Rena Riffel, Katharine Towne, Bonnie Aarons Original title: Mulholland Drive Country: USA Year: 2001 Release date: 11-6-2021 Gender: thriller Script: David Lynch Duration: 147 minutes

    Synopsis: Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), a young aspiring actress, comes to Los Angeles to become a movie star and stays at her aunt’s apartment. There she meets the enigmatic Rita (Laura Harring), a woman who suffers from amnesia due to an accident on Mulholland Drive. The two together decide to investigate who Rita is and how she got there.

    Source: Fotogramas