Nightmare tour of Dream Factory

MULHOLLAND DRIVE
Rating: MA.
Starring: Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Justin Theroux, Dan Hedaya.
Critic's warning: Sex scenes, language, violence.
Critic's rating: 9 out of 10.

If Chinatown was the ultimate movie about American business corruption, then Mulholland Drive is the ultimate movie about the movie business itself.

This relentlessly menacing modern thriller may be the best yet from director David Lynch.

After flicks such as Blue Velvet and television series such as Twin Peaks, Lynch is a master at presenting modern life as a distorted nightmare.

For anyone cynical about Hollywood, and even for wide-eyed admirers, Lynch's latest captures the brutality and disillusionment behind Tinseltown dreams.

Just don't expect a straightforward crime thriller plot.

Although there's sickening suspense aplenty, this has a typically skewed Lynch approach.

The film loops around two women. Betty (Naomi Watts) is a naive newcomer and aspiring actor fresh off the bus to Los Angeles.

Rita (Laura Harring) is a rising star with the glamorous looks which seem tailor-made for Hollywood.

But it's Rita who runs into trouble. Travelling along Los Angeles's Mulholland Drive, a freak car accident leaves her wandering, dazed, into Betty's apartment.

Rita has lost her memory and Betty is thrilled to play detective and enthusiastically searches for clues to Rita's past.

But the pair quickly finds that behind tinselled illusion is a seedy world of mafia criminals, rotting bodies and rotting minds.

Fans will recognise plenty of Lynch's trademark visuals: little misshapen men in big rooms, cars driving at night, characters who seem normal but turn out to be grotesque. Or is that vice versa?

We'll give Lynch the benefit of the doubt and say that the provocative sex scenes were not designed, as is usual, to sell the flick to foreign (non-English speaking) markets.

In fact, scriptwriter Lynch manages to make these scenes satiric, symbolic and unnerving all at the same time.

You can look at Mulholland Drive as a tale of what Hollywood does to women - the impossible expectations of beauty, the simmering celluloid violence, the inevitable sexual humiliation.

But it might be more accurate to say that Mulholland Drive is a story about Hollywood outsiders and those driven mad by never reaching their dream in the ultimate Dream Factory.

The film is certainly the closest yet to that famed story (and film) about Hollywood bit-players, The Day Of The Locust.

Hollywood veteran Ann Miller shows up in a shrewd, layered portrayal of a long-time survivor in Tinseltown.

Justin Theroux is excellent as the egocentric director who finds his career threatened when he resists the orders of a thuggish Mafia-like financier (Dan Hedaya).

Harring will be criticised for her rather robotic performance. To be fair, you have to see her character almost as a fantasy.

The jaw-dropping surprise has to be Watts, the formerly unremarkable Australian actor from Tank Girl (which tanked), Strange Planet, etc.

Watts's range here is astounding, as is her ability to play off her image as a little blonde girlie. In a fairer world it would be she, and not her good friend Nicole Kidman, who collects major prizes this year.

Although your brain might hurt a bit trying to untangle the plot, Mulholland Drive does make sense in a logically twisted way. See it as dream and nightmare combined, present and future, reality and its surreal shadows.

As always, Lynch's production is impeccable, from the moody soundtrack to the cinematography and production design, which makes the "now" Hollywood backgrounds look spookily 1950s.

The Sun-Herald

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