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.
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Other sequences seem completely disconnected from these narrative backbones, perhaps waiting for the connection that would have come in the series project that never took place. Even so, some of those sketches It is memorable: a man who goes to the cafeteria that he dreamed of to actually find the image of doom that he had feared so much in his nightmare. Lynch and company manage to conjure up an almost unspeakable fear: the (irrational?) Panic that the dream world and the real world will converge.
The nightmare scene in the cafeteria was not the only moment where a dread is enacted that is practically speechless. The liturgical mob of The Godfather became Mulholland Drive in a kind of mystical mob. Their rituals became incomprehensible to the uninitiated, and included eschatology and the repetition of mantras (even if they are as mundane as “this is the girl”). A silent authority figure appeared, answering questions with questions and silences that generated panic in its own initiates. Mister Roque is a kind of laconic god to talk to through an intercom behind a glass partition. Behind the screen there is a room that can, of course, recall the famous red room of Twin Peaks.
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More conventional is the vision of that Hollywood as a machine of illusions and a potential source of perversions and perversions. In a way, that vanity fair (and gangster capitalists) serves as the tip of the iceberg of the Lynchian worldview. As it happened in Twin Peaks O Wild Heart, a story of innocence threatened by a dangerous world that perverts is staged. Even with the final carousel of unfolded identities and enigmas that overlap, the outcome of the work continues to conjure up that kind of Flandersian vision where ‘purity’ and goodness are scarce goods almost condemned to brutalization.
An end of (l) cine
The mysteries of the narrative can make us forget that Mulholland Drive it is full of images of extraordinary beauty. And not only of that hodgepodge of beauty and sinister so characteristic of the Lynchian audiovisual, which makes an abundant appearance. The scene that takes place in the disturbing Club Silencio has become unforgettable for so many viewers. Even the disappearance of forms and figures behind a smoke screen after a car accident can become aesthetically hypnotic.
In addition to that, those responsible also give us precious close-ups of the faces of sympathy, desire and concern of the actresses Laura Harring and Naomi Watts. The author starts from archetypal characters and shows us a love story (schematic, almost irrational) that draws on the conventions of film noir and its fundamentally masculine gaze, but the result has something genuinely moving, perhaps because it connects with that idealized idea of goodness. own of the American director. Although that romance full of tenderness and care is just a fantasy outside the real world, or belongs to the past or, simply, it is doomed to fail.
Lynch and her team, including editor Mary Sweeney, made wonderful use of photochemical photography. It would suppose a certain swan song. The same director would say goodbye to celluloid and embrace the digital image in a most unbridled Inland empire I already had little sleep and much, almost everything, nightmare. The manageability of digital cameras would make it easier for the author to enhance the hand-held shots, already very present in Mullholland Drive, and embedded himself more comfortably within the scene as a witness to his own cloudy and disturbing hallucination.
But previously, as the character played by Harring says before visiting the Silence Club, Lynch invited us to go with him to a place. A captivating place, although we do not know exactly where it is located. Dream-nightmares are usually like this.
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