The 2001 Cannes Film Festival was a moment of triumph for the most artistic ‘neo-noir’. David Lynch and Joel Coen shared the Best Director award for their work on Mulholland Drive Y The man who was never there, respectively. That genre, now somewhat displaced from the centrality of mainstream, at that time it generated a constant flow of films, whether they were oriented to the cinematographic exhibition, to cable television or to the videographic market. The shared triumph of Lynch and the Coens at Cannes had something of the end of a decade party in which they premiered Fargo, Memento, Red Rock West O A simple plan.
One of Lynch’s greatest feats was to turn ‘Mulholland Drive’, a pilot episode of a rejected series, into a film that has been repeatedly ranked among the best of the 21st century in critical votes.
David Lynch, for his part, went about his business, as almost always. He had signed unclassifiable contemporary film noir works overflowing with his personal imagery as Wild Heart O Lost road. He tended to use character archetypes but that didn’t matter too much, because he set them on adventures ornamented with illusionist sleight of hand and punctuated by strange moments of rarefied everyday life (enhanced, of course, with music by Angelo Badalamenti). One of Lynch’s greatest feats, “born in Missoula, Montana. Eagle Scout ”, filmmaker, painter and casual meteorologist on his YouTube channel, was turning Mulholland Drive, a pilot episode of a rejected series, in a film that has been repeatedly ranked among the best of the 21st century in critical votes.
Enjoy the trip
Twenty years later, Mulholland Drive it still retains its magic trick aura. From film-experience and film puzzle about nightmares, stuntmen and, perhaps, ghosts. They have coexisted from relatively obvious explanations to far more elaborate interpretations. Even Lynch, always reluctant to specify the meanings of his creations, joined the game and gave ten clues with which to aspire to solve the mystery. Even so, perhaps the best thing is to let yourself go on that narrative journey full of illusionistic smoke and sparks of electricity.
Be that as it may, a ‘noir’ premise provides us with a more or less clear narrative support: a woman in possession of a fortune in bills is going to be executed, but a strange accident saves her life although it costs her memory. Amnesic, the woman finds refuge in an apartment occupied by a very naive actress who has just arrived in Hollywood: Betty.
Lynch and company manage to conjure up an almost unspeakable fear: the (irrational?) Panic that the dream world and the real world converge
Along the way, the film is saturated with images related to the world of dreams. Images of sleeping people abound, enhancing the dreamlike character of the adventure. Among the scenes clearly linked to the supposed main story, in which Betty assumes the role of an enthusiastic and reckless detective amateur (parallel, in part, to that assumed by each viewer), there are scenes laterally connected with that plot. Like the odyssey of humiliations and dispossessions of a filmmaker threatened by the mafia, who is the apparent financier in the shadow of his film and wants to impose an unknown actress for the main role.