Mulholland Dr. (2001) [BluRay + DVD]

David Lynch wrote and directed this look at two women who find themselves walking a fine line between truth and deception in the beautiful but dangerous netherworld of Hollywood. A beautiful woman (Laura Elena Harring) riding in a limousine along Los Angeles' Mulholland Drive is targeted by a would-be shooter, but before he can pull the trigger, she is injured when her limo is hit by another car. The woman stumbles from the wreck with a head wound, and in time makes her way into an apartment with no idea of where or who she is. As it turns out, the apartment is home to an elderly woman who is out of town, and is allowing her niece Betty (Naomi Watts) to stay there; Betty is a small-town girl from Canada who wants to be an actress, and her aunt was able to arrange an audition with a film director for her. Betty befriends the injured woman, who begins calling herself "Rita" after seeing a poster of Rita Hayworth. While Betty's audition impresses a casting agent, and she catches the eye of hotshot director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), Kesher's producers and moneymen insist with no small vehemence that he instead cast a woman named Camilla Rhodes. As Rita attempts to put the pieces of her life back together, she pulls the name Diane Selwyn from her memory; Rita thinks it could be her real name, but when she and Betty find a listing for Diane Selwyn and visit her apartment, they discover the latest victim of a mysterious killer who is eluding police detective Harry McKnight (Robert Forster). Rita's emotional identity soon takes a left turn, and it turns out that neither woman is quite who she once appeared to be. David Lynch originally conceived Mulholland Drive as the pilot film for a television series; after the ABC television network rejected the pilot and declined to air it, the French production film StudioCanal took over the project, and Lynch reshot and re-edited the material into a theatrical feature. The resulting version of Mulholland Drive premiered at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, where David Lynch shared Best Director honors with Joel Coen.

Mark Deming, Rovi

David Lynch’s works have always existed in a world of their own, from 1976′s Eraserhead and 1980′s The Elephant Man, right through Twin Peaks and 1996′s Inland Empire, the writer/director has always enjoyed toying with the surreal; twisting the bounds of fantasy and reality. Perhaps, arguably, none of his films did this more effectively or evocatively than 2001′s Mulholland Drive.

A neo-noir anachronistic pulp fiction trip through the dark underbelly of Hollywood, Mulholland Drive throws away any notion of traditional, linear storytelling in favor of blending of fantasy and reality where you’re never really sure what’s real, or which direction you’re heading.

It’s Hollywood, and the pie-eyed blonde Canadian actress Betty (Naomi Watts) has arrived at her aunt’s place to find a mysterious and beautiful brunette, Rita (Laura Elena Harring) who’s been in a car accident and lost her memory. Betty endeavors to aid Rita regain her memory, and it takes the two down a strange path where the dream world and the real world collide. Their story intersects with a film director (Justin Theroux) being strong-armed into hiring an actress in the lead role of his film by two gangsters, but his connection to the two ladies may run deeper than it seems.

Sexy, sleek, dark, and erotic, Mullholland Drive is filled with esoteric symbolism. It is wide open to interpretation, particularly given Lynch’s brilliant and completely unpredictable plot twist that turns Mulholland Drive into two different films, forcing viewers to reinterpret what they’d come to assume during the first part of the film. But, what is the reality? That, I am afraid, is for you or anyone to decide. Brilliant.

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David Lynch has been working toward "Mulholland Drive" all of his career, and now that he's arrived there I forgive him "Wild at Heart" and even "Lost Highway." At last his experiment doesn't shatter the test tubes. The movie is a surrealist dreamscape in the form of a Hollywood film noir, and the less sense it makes, the more we can't stop watching it.

It tells the story of . . . well, there's no way to finish that sentence. There are two characters named Betty and Rita who the movie follows through mysterious plot loops, but by the end of the film we aren't even sure they're different characters, and Rita (an amnesiac who lifted the name from a "Gilda" poster) wonders if she's really Diane Selwyn, a name from a waitress' name tag.

Betty (Naomi Watts) is a perky blond, Sandra Dee crossed with a Hitchcock heroine, who has arrived in town to stay in her absent Aunt Ruth's apartment and audition for the movies. Rita (Laura Elena Harring) is a voluptuous brunet who is about to be murdered when her limousine is front-ended by drag racers. She crawls out of the wreckage on Mulholland Drive, stumbles down the hill, and is taking a shower in the aunt's apartment when Betty arrives.

Rita doesn't remember anything, even her name. Betty decides to help her. As they try to piece her life back together, the movie introduces other characters. A movie director (Justin Theroux) is told to cast an actress in his movie or be murdered; a dwarf in a wheelchair (Michael J. Anderson) gives instructions by cell phone; two detectives turn up, speak standard TV cop show dialogue, and disappear; a landlady (Ann Miller–yes, Ann Miller) wonders who the other girl is in Aunt Ruth's apartment; Betty auditions; the two girls climb in through a bedroom window, Nancy Drew style; a rotting corpse materializes, and Betty and Rita have two lesbian love scenes so sexy you'd swear this was a 1970s movie, made when movie audiences liked sex. One of the scenes also contains the funniest example of pure logic in the history of sex scenes.

Having told you all of that, I've basically explained nothing. The movie is hypnotic; we're drawn along as if one thing leads to another–but nothing leads anywhere, and that's even before the characters start to fracture and recombine like flesh caught in a kaleidoscope. "Mulholland Drive" isn't like "Memento," where if you watch it closely enough, you can hope to explain the mystery. There is no explanation. There may not even be a mystery.

There have been countless dream sequences in the movies, almost all of them conceived with Freudian literalism to show the characters having nightmares about the plot. "Mulholland Drive" is all dream. There is nothing that is intended to be a waking moment. Like real dreams, it does not explain, does not complete its sequences, lingers over what it finds fascinating, dismisses unpromising plotlines. If you want an explanation for the last half hour of the film, think of it as the dreamer rising slowly to consciousness, as threads from the dream fight for space with recent memories from real life, and with fragments of other dreams–old ones and those still in development.

This works because Lynch is absolutely uncompromising. He takes what was frustrating in some of his earlier films, and instead of backing away from it, he charges right through. "Mulholland Drive" is said to have been assembled from scenes that he shot for a 1999 ABC television pilot, but no network would air (or understand) this material, and Lynch knew it. He takes his financing where he can find it and directs as fancy dictates. This movie doesn't feel incomplete because it could never be complete–closure is not a goal.

Laura Elena Harring and Naomi Watts take the risk of embodying Hollywood archetypes, and get away with it because they are archetypes. Not many actresses would be bold enough to name themselves after Rita Hayworth, but Harring does, because she can. Slinky and voluptuous in clinging gowns, all she has to do is stand there and she's the first good argument in 55 years for a "Gilda" remake. Naomi Watts is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, a plucky girl detective. Like a dream, the movie shifts easily between tones; there's an audition where a girl singer performs "Sixteen Reasons" and "I Told Every Little Star," and the movie isn't satirizing "American Bandstand," it's channeling it.

This is a movie to surrender yourself to. If you require logic, see something else. "Mulholland Drive" works directly on the emotions, like music. Individual scenes play well by themselves, as they do in dreams, but they don't connect in a way that makes sense–again, like dreams. The way you know the movie is over is that it ends. And then you tell a friend, "I saw the weirdest movie last night." Just like you tell them you had the weirdest dream.

Roger Ebert, link

This is one of the best movies ever made and I am not saying that because I am being fooled by the seemingly nonsensical presentation. Those who dislike the film because they don't understand the story often criticize those who are praising the film by saying that they are assuming its genius because they don't understand it. I don't view this movie as very allegorical. To me, it is a story with a beginning, middle and end. People become confused by the film because they expect it to have a deep, philosophical meaning that they are to interpret from the allegedly meaningless scenes. I feel they fail to realize that the crypticness comes from a chopped-up and rearranged plot combined with a very long and rather explanatory fantasy sequence and not from a chaos of visual allegory. Because of the limitation of length, I will try to keep this short and to the point and touch on the major concepts.

The general plot: Diane moves to L.A. after jitterbug contest to get into acting. At an audition, she meets Camilla with whom she falls in love. Diane becomes enraged with jealousy since Camilla sleeps with other men and women. Diane discovers the other man (the director) at a film shoot and discovers the other woman (a random blond) at the engagement party for Camilla and the director. Motivated by her rage and possessiveness, Diane hires a hit man to kill Camilla. After that is done, she is overcome by loneliness and slips into an unconscious fantasy world where she lives the life she wants to. Diane is then awakened. In her conscious state she is haunted by what she has done.

The significance of the fantasy: The film starts out, after the credits, with a 1st person p.o.v. shot depicting somebody collapsing onto a bed and slipping into unconsciousness. This is where Diane's fantasy starts. The accident is there as an excuse for her to "bring back" her dead girlfriend and justify the fantasy life. She depicts her girlfriend as meek and innocent because that is what she wished she was. In the meantime, she acts like everything is "like in the movies" because she has an escapist personality. She also, in a sense, kills herself off and assumes the identity of a waitress named Betty at a diner. The story revolving around the director is a direct result of her feeling that he was in someway victimized in reality just as she was and "convinces" herself that he was forced to choose Camilla. It was also an unconscious expression of the lack of control she felt during the party. Camilla Rhoades in the fantasy is actually the random blond from the engagement party. She hated her so much that she turned her into Camilla and made the ultimate antagonist. She then took the real Camilla and turned her into a perfect, submissive out-of-the-movies girlfriend and used Rita Hayworth as an inspiration. She also paints the hit man as a very clumsy and incapable person to further justify the survival of Camilla. Her fantasy world, unfortunately for her, was a search for Diane which ended up being herself and made the dreamworld die by taking her through a series of reminders of reality. The first reminder was Club Silencio which chanted that "there is no band" and the "instruments" you hear are not really there; this is a metaphor for the fantasy. She begins to shake violently because it shakes her perception of her surroundings. The other reminder is the blue box… Actually, the blue box is not the reminder itself (more of a Pandora's Box, really), but the blue key that opens the box. The blue key reminds her of the actual death of Camilla because it is what the hit man said would show up when it was done. Along with having love, this entire creation of hers is an escape from reality by living in the idealized Hollywood that she expected to be part of when she arrived.

This is a story showing the psychology of a very troubled woman who lost a dream. It is not series of random things specifically designed to disturb and it is not a cryptic philosophical message. It is an unfortunate chunk of the human condition that is presented beautifully.

However, ultimately this is all my opinion. I may be way off. Or it may not be intended to mean any one thing. There are many who disagree with me. Great! Afterall, why does it have to mean anything? Why can't it just be a statement in itself? What if coherent, sensible narratives are shackles for artistic expression? Peter Greenaway, for example, has spent many words eloquently supporting that idea by such statements as "I would argue that if you want to write narratives, be an author, be a novelist, don't be a film maker. Because I believe film making is so much more exciting in areas which aren't primarily to do with narrative." And where is the written rule that everything must be immediately understandable with only one possible interpretation? There is no such rule because the clarity of the movie is unrelated to the art of it. "I didn't understand it!" So…? "Mulholland Dr.," story or not, affects the viewers, harasses them, drags them, awes them, lulls them. The way it lends itself to interpretation is amazing. It never gets old. It never loses its luster. Its visuals are always effective and beautiful. It is cinematic perfection no matter what. Enjoy.

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DVD Extras:
• Chapter Selections Approved by David Lynch
• The Making Of Mulholland Drive
• Exclusive interviews with Mary Sweeney (subtitled), Angelo Badalamenti, David Lynch, Naomi Watts, Justin Theroux, Laura Harring, (English language)
• Press Conference at Cannes
• Trailer
• Inland Empire preview