Movie Notes: Mulholland Drive
Mulholland Drive: Hot lesbians Lynch-style
= 3 stars
Starring Naomi Watts, Laura Harring
Directed by David Lynch
This is a David Lynch film, so know what you’re getting into. It has a dusky, morose mood combined with a strange fever-feeling I had as a kid, lying in bed and feeling like body parts are shrinking while everything in the room is alternately too big or too large.
Mulholland Drive is essentially layering of ideas that mash together into something fuzzy but beautiful; just out of sight. Love, Hollywood, murder, suicide, lesbians, and weirdos. If anything I think Lynch is trying to say something about Hollywood’s sinister part in creating false images that people worship. The image gets all the credit while the real person is cast aside. An actress caves in on herself so much that she seems outside her own body. Yeah, that probably makes no sense but neither does the film.
As for David Lynch’s other works, I did enjoy Blue Velvet since its plot was more direct, but feel Wild at Heart was a huge load of horse crap. Between then and now, I haven’t given David Lynch much thought, despite his success with Twin Peaks. I’ll give Mulholland Drive this though, it certainly creates an evocative mood, which feels more like a poem or a song than a film. If you toss out plot and literal meaning and consider everything as a metaphor, it’s pretty entertaining.
Only two-thirds of a movie, really. Everything after the ‘Silencio’ segment is utterly naff, most of the material before it is excellent. Also contains Naomi Watts’ best work to date (see the astonishing ‘audition’ sequence, for example), not to mention a great seedy, creepy atmosphere and two extremely attractive female leads (who, yes, get to perform a seriously fine make-out scene together). Just wish it stopped at ‘Silencio’, that’s all.
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