Filmmaker David Lynch’s new three-hour operatic freak out of a movie, Inland Empire, has been confounding both critics and audiences since its dual premieres at the Venice and New York Film Festivals in September.
Shot on video, mostly by Lynch himself, using a prosumer-level Sony video camera, the picture is, like its predecessor Mulholland Dr., another surreal, investigative journey into the subconscious of a Hollywood actress, here played Laura Dern. Where the earlier film surprised viewers with a climatic last act that rearranged its earlier, seemingly disparate scenes into a wickedly coherent, deeply satisfying narrative, Inland Empire offers no such solace to even the most patient viewer.
By turns profoundly disturbing, absurdly funny, and mind-numbingly dull, the sheer length of the piece and Lynch’s adamant refusal to build it along even tangentially conventional lines forces you to surrender preconceived notions about narrative tension, story climaxes, character arcs and the rest, and to submit to a free floating atmosphere of fist-clenching dread. At times I thought I was watching a 21st-century update of a German Expressionist masterpiece, with a woman imperiled in a series of haunted Hollywood mansions and derelict apartments; at other times I thought the whole thing was a self-indulgent disaster and wanted to get up and leave. I’m glad I stayed.
As unpleasant as it sometimes is, it’s definitely a real movie experience, completely transporting the viewer who stays with it — warts and all — into a sui generis world. As to what it means, Lynch himself is not saying, but that’s par for the course with him. What he is talking about are the wonders of shooting on video and how for him “film is completely dead.” Coming from a filmmaker who has created some of the most startlingly beautiful images ever put onto a celluloid strip, this is at once exciting, as one looks toward a new medium’s growth with Lynch onboard; and a bit depressing, knowing what’s getting left behind. Ever the iconoclast, Lynch has convinced his main backer, France’s Studio Canal, to let him self distribute his flick stateside. Look out for it in December.
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Comments on this entry:
Thanks for the post. This makes me want to see this movie; I've seen far too many films that expect me to turn off my brain and enjoy. But I'm not willing to do the former so I'm unable to do the latter.
This sounds like a film to catch.