Lynch's trip on a road to nowhere

By KARL QUINN
REVIEW
The Age newspaper, Melbourne
Sunday 3 February 2002

Mulholland Drive (MA, 147 mins)
At the Kino, Nova, Rivoli, Elsternwick Classic and Jam Factory Europa.
Rating: ****

Watching David Lynch's latest assault on the concept of linear narrative, I was acutely aware of its failings. So many pointless red herrings, all those shots of people's legs as they walk out of frame, the sluggish pacing that echoes nothing quite so much as his 1977 feature debut Eraserhead. Then I went home and couldn't stop thinking about it. I still can't.

Mulholland Drive is a lot like an Escher print. Just working out what's going on at a surface level fairly does your head in. You take one step after another, feel like you're getting some place, then slowly realise that the staircase you thought was taking you up towards some sort of comprehension has actually brought you back to where you started. It's a loop, potentially endless. Whether it's the result of sloppiness or genius on Lynch's part is quite irrelevant. What matters is that it's fascinating.

At least some of the confusion surely stems from the fact that Mulholland Drive started out as a pilot for a TV series. When the series was given the thumbs down by the American ABC network, it languished in limbo until Lynch decided to reshoot some scenes, rejig his script and release it as a feature. Last year it won Lynch the Best Director award at Cannes.

(Frankly, I wish it had fulfilled its original destiny. Nothing on TV has come close to the excitement of Lynch's two series of Twin Peaks back in the early '90s.)

At any rate, Lynch spends the first half hour or so setting up multiple storylines, many of which will amount to nothing. But the central thread is always going to be the one that binds the characters played by Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring.

Watts first appears as a naive young thing called Betty who moves to LA to be an actress. Later she will appear as a discarded would-be actress called Diane.

Harring first appears as a woman with amnesia. She doesn't know her name, but calls herself Rita after spying a poster for Gilda (starring Rita Hayworth) on a wall. Later, she is Camilla Rhodes, a successful and ruthless actress and Diane's former girlfriend.

This might be a simple (!) case of parallel universes or even a meta-filmic conceit a la Godard, the sort of thing that draws attention to the very "film"ness of the film. But things are much more complicated than that. As fresh-off-the-plane Betty and don't-know-my-name Rita join forces to unravel the mystery of the latter's identity, what they find takes them ever closer to Diane. And if she inhabits the same universe as Betty, can it possibly hold them both?

Mulholland Drive is unsettling in the best possible way. Sure, there's sex and violence and perversity, but it's all pretty tame by Lynch's standards. Where it really messes with us is in the whole idea of narrative. Even though the last 30 minutes or so offers a resolution of sorts, the straight reading (how amusing that the director's last feature was called The Straight Story) unravels before the mind's eye.

Lynch watchers will recognise much about Mulholland Drive from earlier work - there's even a bizarre Roy Orbison moment that echoes Blue Velvet, with a woman singing (or miming) to a Spanish version of Crying - and for my money there's a kind of pattern emerging. It's the idea of the portal, the doorway to another world. It took the form of a radiator in Eraserhead, a dismembered ear in Blue Velvet, Bill Pulman's fractured mind in Lost Highway.

Here it's in the shape of a blue box and its matching key. But don't imagine for a second that that will unlock the mystery. Mulholland Drive is a glorious road to nowhere.

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