Cinema: David Lynch is back...

Six years after Mulholland drive, David Lynch is back with "Inland Empire", an hallucinating film about cinema, acting, space and time and inner liberation, going further than ever before and filming longer (nearly three hours). And back with him is Laura Dern, as producer and with an extraordinary piece of acting. It is Lynch's first movie shot with a consumer digicam (the Sony PD-150).

David Lynch’s films are usually not transparent and it’s not easy to reach a conclusive explanation of any of his films. And each time we see a film we may get to different conclusions. I had to see Mulholland drive three times to get some clue... But this time, even by his usual standards, Lynch goes a bit (too?) far… He is supposed to film the remake of a polish film, one which was never released because the two main actors were killed (adultery?), but nearly from the outset we get lost and do not know which parts belong to the remake or to the original or which parts are dream or “reality”, nightmare or pure fantasy, which relate to the unconscious or the subconscious, and where it all takes places in space… and time. Lynch takes no account of the laws of space and time, of cause and effect, action and reaction, real and surreal… The best here is to abandon all logic and let yourself go and be surprised by the crazy intertwined line of action, but don’t even try to fix the puzzle. Anyway, why would we need to understand? We should just let Lynch drive our feeling through this ‘rollercoaster’ of emotions. In the end, Lynch is a painter (which he already was before he started filming, and he also practises transcendental meditation) and the screen is his canvas where he shapes emotions, fantasies, abstract ideas, painting here a claustrophobic, hallucinatory, tiring, obsessive, terrifying, spooky, weird but in the end liberating atmosphere.

In this film he revisits the bewitched Hollywood boulevard, as no other local film director has done recently, yet he is totally atypical there. I wouldn’t call Lynch an elitist, as Peter Travers wrote in the Rolling stone, “ See him for what he is: an artist following his own maverick instincts and inviting us to jump with him into the wild blue.”

Yet, this travel gets heavy after a while and one could get tired of trying to fit the puzzle and follow Laura Dern's pace… the story goes on for too long (nearly three hours) and it all gets a bit repetitive (I know it’s on purpose and part of the plot) but it proves burdensome after a while. A film must be able to surprise, to provoque but it also should be a pleasure to watch, it should be entertaining not boring, so when it gets to a certain stage it is not really achieving it. And one has to struggle to keep following the ‘plot’ and avoid disconnecting.

There are however great moments of cinema, like the ‘human rabbits’ scenes – anthological - (voiced by Naomi Watts, Laura Harring and Scott Coffey), the hookers who sing "The Loco-Motion" song and the changes of scenes from L.A. to Poland to somewhere we don’t know. I must say I had a bit difficulty following and it became too much and too long after a while. I still prefer Mulholland drive, Lost Highway or Blue Velvet. Yet I recognise this is another piece of Lynch’s art, maybe his most ambitious to date, so don’t miss it.

And one shouldn't forget the soundtrack, which works as a sound painting perfectly fitting the images. This time without Angelo Bardalamenti or Julee Cruise, but with songs written and composed by Lynch himself or with Christa Bell, interpreted by The Mantovani Orchestra, the National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, The Dave Brubeck Quartet and Lynch himself, among others.

As Manohla Dargis wrote in the New York Times, “In “Inland Empire,” the classic hero’s journey has been supplanted by a series of jarringly discordant scenes, situations and setups that reflect one another much like the repeating images in the splintered hall of mirrors at the end of Orson Welles’s “Lady From Shanghai.” The spaces in “Inland Empire” function as way stations, holding pens, states of minds (Nikki’s, Susan’s, Mr. Lynch’s), sites of revelation and negotiation, of violence and intimacy. They are cinematic spaces in which images flower and fester, and stories are born.”