Everything you were afraid to ask about “Mulholland Drive”“Mulholland Drive,” the latest feature from director David Lynch, is exhilarating — two hours and 2. But it’s also confusing. Bits and pieces of plot dribble out; characters appear and disappear; the film takes an incomprehensible turn two- thirds of the way through; and there seem to be three or four disparate story lines that have virtually nothing to do with one another. In this way, the film is similar to Lynch’s “Lost Highway,” his cinematic scud missile of 1. In that film, the 4. Bill Pullman languishes in a locked prison cell. He then, without explanation, turns into the 2. Balthazar Getty and is released from prison, and the movie goes off on a new story tangent. That was just one puzzling development in a film whose plot was regularly described as a M. Beyond that, the narrative is intricate and playfully surreal rather than opaque and frustrating. Indeed, it may be the most conventional and coherent of Lynch’s “hard” movies (“Eraserhead,” “Blue Velvet,” “Twin Peaks,” “Fire Walk With Me,” “Wild at Heart,” “Lost Highway”). All the themes that cycle through his work — strange figures pulling the strings behind the scenes, random acts of extreme violence, bizarre character fixations and the feeling that the surreal is an active part of our everyday life — are present here, but he’s tied them to a narrative structure that, in the end, resolves itself. For aficionados, there are red herrings that will maintain many a debate, but others will suspect that Lynch is finally coming out and telling us what he’s all about. Still, of recent American movies, only “Memento” is remotely as challenging, and it’s still almost impenetrable on first viewing. What follows includes a synopsis of the plot and then questions and answers about what in the world is going on in “Mulholland Drive’s” strange universe. So stop reading now if you haven’t yet seen the film.
Then we see washed- out superimposed footage of a young woman with a sort of beatific homecoming queen smile on her face. Then there’s a few seconds of a red blanket; breathing sounds pulse on the soundtrack. Then the movie proper starts, with a few parallel stories: In one, a gorgeous woman is in the back of a limo, climbing the winding curves of Mulholland Drive above Los Angeles. The driver stops unexpectedly and points a pistol at her. But before he can fire the limo is rammed by one of a pair of drag- racing cars. The voluptuous woman gets out in a daze and stumbles down the hills into Hollywood and ends up sleeping in an apartment whose owner is away on vacation. Then we see a diner, with an odd, nervous, nerdy- looking young guy talking to a more composed middle- aged man. ![]() The younger one says he’s had a dream about the diner and a monster outside. They go outside and see the monster! The young guy collapses. Someone is after the woman who wandered off from the car wreck. We see a strange man pick up a phone and hear that they haven’t found her yet. He calls a number and passes along the message; we see a dirty yellow wall phone picked up and accept the message. ![]() Then we see that phone hung up, picked up and dialed. A phone rings on a coffee table next to an ashtray, but no one answers. We are introduced to another character, Betty, as she gets off a plane, chatting gaily with an elderly couple she met on the flight. Betty is a bushy- tailed, almost painfully chipper young woman just arrived in Los Angeles to make her fortune as an actress. The older couple effusively wish her luck. In yet another narrative stream, a young director, Adam, is being forced by some evil Hollywood studio types to cast a certain ing. Arrogantly, he refuses; a strange man in a spooky room orders that the film be shut down. Adam leaves for home in despair and finds his wife in bed with the pool man, who beats him up. The blond guy pulls out a gun and shoots the other, apparently to get a mysterious black book that has some sort of connection to the attempted killing of Rita. But a shot goes awry and hits a woman in the next office. ![]() The hit guy tries to strangle her, then shoots her. Then he shoots a janitor who wanders by. Your complete guide for Orlando theater and performing arts news, theater reviews, art exhibits, auditions and more. Watch breaking news videos, viral videos and original video clips on CNN.com. Then he shoots the janitor’s vacuum cleaner and starts a fire, which sets off alarms and sprinklers. Betty is staying in the vacant apartment of her aunt, in a building run by an older woman who calls herself Coco. Betty stumbles on the bruised woman hiding out in the shower! She’s under the impression, at first, that she’s a friend of her aunt’s; but it eventually is revealed that the strange guest is suffering from amnesia. She christens herself Rita, after seeing Rita Hayworth’s name on a movie poster; the pair find $5. Rita’s pocketbook. This suits the Nancy Drew- like inclinations of the out- of- towner perfectly, and they set out to figure out the secret of Rita’s life. The director is thoroughly menaced by some dark forces, including a very scary guy in a cowboy hat in a deserted corral at the top of Beachwood Canyon, high above Hollywood. The cowboy, calm but dangerous, tells the director again to hire Camilla, the ing. She and Rita practice her lines; she’s clumsy and conventional. ![]() But at the actual audition she turns into a sensual bombshell — and blows away the producer and everyone watching! Then a casting agent walks Betty over to the director’s movie set. It seems to be some sort of ’5. We see a woman sing Connie Stevens’ “1. Reasons.” Then Camilla, the ing. Betty and Adam’s eyes meet. But she runs home to Rita. The two women follow clues to the apartment of another young woman, Diane. They speak to Diane’s neighbor, then break into her apartment and find her dead and decayed in her bed! Shaken, the two return home and dress Rita in a blond wig as a disguise. Betty invites Rita to share her bed that night. Rita makes a pass and the pair find comfort in each other’s arms. I’m in love with you.” Rita has a dream about a stage show in a nightclub. She drags them to the club, which is called Silencio. There, musicians and singers pretend to perform, but the music is all canned. Says the emcee: “This is all a tape recording. It is an illusion.” Up in the balcony, the pair begin crying. Betty shakes and weeps in some hyperemotional response to the music. Without explanation, she finds a glistening blue box in her purse. Rita turns to the closet. When she turns around, Betty has disappeared. Rita uses the key to open the box. She’s apparently sucked into it; we zoom into it, presumably from her point of view, and it drops to the floor. The movie suddenly changes. We’re back at the dead Diane’s apartment. We hear knocks at her door; we even see the mysterious cowboy again! Her neighbor, whom we met before, finally wakes her up. Diane is a haggard, dirty- blond with a nervous twitch and a beaten- down look. She notices a blue key on her coffee table. She’s involved with a taunting but cold brunet — the amnesia victim, Rita! The brunet’s real name, we learn, is Camilla — which is the same name as the ing. But that woman was blond and much shorter — an entirely different woman. The two women have sex on the couch, but Camilla suddenly goes cold. Camilla says, “We shouldn’t do this any more.” Diane, horrified, says, “Don’t say that,” and tries to force her way with her. This Camilla is suddenly the object of the charms of the young film director, now happily separated from his wife. We see him putting the moves on her on his movie set. Camilla makes sure that Diane can watch, which she does, glowering. Later we see Diane masturbating in an unhappy frenzy. The phone rings; the phone she picks up is the one that isn’t answered at the beginning of the movie. Diane is taken in a limo to the party — the same limo, it seems, we saw Rita in at the beginning of the film. It’s on the same ominous trip up Mulholland Drive, too. But she’s not about to be shot. Instead, she’s greeted at a party by Rita, who is now Camilla. The host is the director, and the weird Coco is now the director’s mother! She questions Diane with a look of disapproval on her face. We learn that Diane was a teen jitterbugging champion in Canada who came to Hollywood after her aunt died and left her some money. Diane says she’s acted a bit, and met Camilla at an audition for a big part in a movie called “The Sylvia North Story,” directed by Paul Bruckner. But she lost the part to Camilla. Diane, humiliatingly, is forced to watch first as the blond Camilla from the first half of the movie comes over and kisses her Camilla, deeply on the lips. And then Camilla and Adam make out in front of her at the table. They seem to be about to announce their engagement. This scene abruptly cuts to one in which we see a distraught Diane sitting again in the diner, paying the shaggy hit man $5. He’s holding a black book. She’ll find a blue key on her coffee table when the deed is done, he says. The camera pans out into the back lot of the diner, where we see the monster again. It’s a homeless man, it turns out, his face filthy and his hair matted. He’s turning the mysterious deep blue box over in his hands. We suddenly are reintroduced to the cheerful elderly couple who accompanied Betty off the plane — incredibly tiny, and crawling out of the mysterious box. Now they are shrieking and horrific. They chase Diane around her apartment in a phalanx of terror. She flees to her bedroom and shoots herself in the head. The couple laugh maniacally. We see the ominous L. A. Spectral washed out images float over it, just like at the beginning of the movie. This time we can see Betty and Camilla’s faces. Then there’s a shot of an odd, heavily made- up actress from the club the women went to. Let’s take them in order. Then, in a masturbatory fantasy cum fever dream in the moments before she commits suicide, she reimagines her ruined career and failed relationship with the woman she loves. The dream begins with Camilla/Rita miraculously escaping the hit Diane had taken out on her.
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