Review of Mulholland Drive

Introduction

David Lynch holds a special place in my heart. As the director of Dune, he presided over my all time favourite flop. A bold attempt at bringing forth Frank Herbert`s visionary masterpiece to the screen, David Lynch created a fantastic world of the distant future with a beautiful design and extravagant characters. That it was a box office failure is lamentable, but it still is a magnificent failure. However, David Lynch is far more renowned for his successes. With films like Eraserhead and Blue Velvet as well as the acclaimed Twin Peaks television series, Lynch has established a reputation for genre bending and emotionally powerful cinema. Mulholland Drive has been critically acclaimed and has received accolades from all branches of the press. Naturally this has piqued my interest and a quick visit to my local public library has accorded me the opportunity to add my two pennies worth.

This is one of those movies where the less said about the plot the better. When a woman emerges from a car accident on Mulholland Drive bemused and suffering from amnesia, she makes her way to the doorstep of a new arrival to Hollywood. The fresh-faced Betty has come to Hollywood pursuing her dreams of stardom and seeing this attractive but helpless stranger takes her in and decides to help her in unravelling the mystery of her identity. Meanwhile a director is attempting to make his movie despite the interference of studio executives and a sinister conspiracy dictating his casting choices. How these stories come together, twist and turn is unexpected, unprecedented and will challenge your very perceptions, but they are never less than compelling.

Video

Mulholland Drive is presented in a 1.85:1 anamorphic aspect ratio, not letterbox as it states on the case. The transfer itself is ideal, with the image sharp and colourful and with no evidence of any compression artefacts. There are moments of print damage, obvious scratches or black vertical lines, but such was my immersion in the film and my fascination with the mystery that the director was weaving, that I`m half certain that they are deliberate flaws, inserted to further play with our perceptions.

This film like no other is absolutely compelling, you find yourself glued to everything that is happening on screen unwilling to miss even a second. The cinematography and the direction are instrumental in building a dark and forbidding Hollywood, one of tortured dreams and altered perceptions. From the first frame, Lynch uses the medium almost effortlessly to weave this convoluted tale. The contrast between Lynch`s trademark dark imagery and the bright hopeful world of Hollywood is powerfully realised and mirrors the psyches of the characters. This is not a film to watch when your attention is distracted.

Audio

The sound is a DD 5.1 track and the surround is used effectively to heighten the atmosphere and maintain the unease of the audience. There is a subliminal quality to the sound design that works to accent the unreality of the story or increase tension when you least expect it. The brilliant and evocative soundtrack from Angelo Badalamenti helps this. His ethereal music is often haunting and is tailored perfectly to the story.

Features

This disc is light on the extras, and given the nature of the film that is perfectly understandable. It`s obvious that no one wants to give away anything about the mystery to the extent that there aren`t even any chapter breaks. You have to watch the film in one block and are deterred from jumping back and forth to try and fathom the mystery.

There is the ubiquitous trailer as well as cast and crew biographies.

There are also some interviews with the cast and the director, though these are quite short and consist of sound bites.

Finally there is an insert with ten clues to cracking the mystery, pointing out things to watch for in the film.

Conclusion

I may have mentioned before my fondness for movies that mess with my head. Films that twist and turn, that alter perceptions of reality, that play with preconceived ideas of narrative and structure are the films that push forward the boundaries of the medium and constantly innovate and invigorate what often seems like a moribund industry. Mulholland Drive is perhaps the best example in recent years of such visionary cinema, and a movie that many have hailed as David Lynch`s masterpiece. Most films require you to leave your brains at the door and be spoon-fed a story with a safe, comfortable structure. We call them blockbusters. A few films will challenge your mind while entertaining you, a good example being Pulp Fiction. The rare film, like Memento actually makes you think, has gaps in the narrative that you are challenged to fill and forces you to be a participant in the story. Mulholland Drive goes a step further and actually sets you homework, with a narrative so convoluted and disjointed that not only must you watch the film like a hawk, but also once the end credits have rolled, your mind will be working for hours trying to satisfactorily piece together what you have just seen.

Objectively Mulholland Drive is an amazing piece of cinema. David Lynch`s great strength is to explore the darkest reaches of the human psyche, and he does that in spades here. The film introduces us to a cast of characters who are almost grotesques, caricatures of people that represent the darker underbelly of Hollywood. Lynch directs with his customary style. There is a sensuality and sexuality to his characters that simmers beneath the surface, and the story is all about the passions and hatreds that thrive in this dark vision of Tinseltown. The story that is woven is gripping stuff, the disjointed narrative often appears unrelated, but there are clues everywhere for the audience to pick up on, but masked by various red herrings and blind alleys. But above all, if you understand human feelings then the story will begin to make sense.

But I have to speak personally as well, and I must say that I didn`t like Mulholland Drive, despite its obvious strengths and sheer style. While I do like thought provoking and convention defying cinema like this, I found that something about Mulholland Drive left me cold. However convoluted a story is, I feel that any movie must have an emotional hook. A moment that grabs me and says, "This is the reason that you are watching this film, Jitendar". I couldn`t find that moment in Mulholland Drive and the experience of watching it left me emotionally unsatisfied. While the story revolves around the passions and desires of the characters, I found it hard to have any empathy with them. It became a dry intellectual experience for me, a puzzle to solve and little else.

So why am I giving it a decent mark and such a rave review? Well for one thing this is an amazingly challenging film. It`s very rare that a film keeps me up at night with my brain working, but I couldn`t sleep until I was satisfied that the story made sense to me. The next day, while I was happy with what I had decided about the film, I couldn`t help but ask for a second opinion. I popped over to IMDB to see what visitors had written about Mulholland Drive and if there were any new insights about the plot. What I found was unprecedented. At the time of writing there were 1047 visitor comments about Mulholland Drive and most of them varied in content. Some hailed the film as the greatest movie ever and called for David Lynch`s canonisation. Others denounced the film as a heresy and were quite vitriolic in their denunciation of Lynch. In between were various theories and ideas regarding the plot and the various twists, with a lot of people having their own interpretation. That`s when I realised Mulholland Drive is art. I`m not talking about the conventional definition of arthouse cinema, but rather that it`s analogous to a work by da Vinci or Picasso, in that David Lynch`s vision is valid in its own right as a piece of work. More than any other film its beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And like any other work of art it is capable of provoking intense debates about its merits. I may not be able to recognise the beauty in Mulholland Drive, but to deny that its power, style and intelligence may appeal to others would be the height of hubris.

Never has my final statement been more apt. Watch Mulholland Drive and decide for yourself.