Film Weekly... with Dan (9/4/10 - 16/4/10)

Just the one film in this busy week for me. But what a choice!

Mulholland Drive (2001, dir. Lynch)

Wow. Mulholland Drive is superbly surreal. I knew this before watching it, from a small amount of word of mouth, plus seeing David Lynch's name, one can guess so much. I really didn't expect something quite so brilliant though. Truly postmodern, it kicks off with lots of seemingly unrelated vignettes, something akin to Pulp Fiction, only without the consistent themes.

Upon finishing the film, my immediate reading of it (don't you just love things of which you truly can interpret it in a multitude of ways? See also: Lost) was that the first half was an aspirational dream of Diane Selwyn, recasting herself in such a way that she would be the heroin to her female lover's, in the dream sequence a confused amnesiac, damsel in distress. The ending is the grim reality: a crumbling relationship haunted by depression, leading to Diane/Betty's eventual suicide.

Plot aside, the aesthetics and mise-en-scene are just staggering. It's creepy, at times genuinely very unsettling, at other times fantastically terrifying and upsetting. At times it's beautiful, at times it's bleak, but it's always intensely engrossing. A truly incredible work of art. You know what to do.

9.4 / 10

That's all for this week I'm afraid. Come back next week!