Blu-ray Review: MULHOLLAND DRIVE (Studio Canal Collection)

It has been the better part of a decade since David Lynch€™s curious take on the movie industry, Mulholland Drive, hit the screens, and it stands up as a haunting, engrossing picture. Of Lynch€™s work it is amongst his more accessible, although still not everyone agrees what it all means. The received wisdom (spoilers!) is that for the most part it all takes place in the dream of a character we do not properly meet until the final sequence. Dreams are a motif in Lynch movies, and he often seems to be drawing from his own unconscious. One of the first shots of the movie appears to be a POV of someone going to sleep. A subsequent scene, one of the most memorable in the movie, involves a character describing a dream of his own. That scene is one of several in the movie that seem almost self-contained; they refer, narratively and thematically, to other scenes and characters, but around the central story thread they also stand alone. Rewatching the movie for the first time in years, I kept thinking, ah yes, this is a good bit. As part of a fantastic new collection from Studio Canal, Mulholland Drive is available on Blu-ray from today The central plot (wrong word) involves two women: a confident wannabe actress called Betty (Naomi Watts), and a nameless car accident victim who has lost her memory and adopts the name Rita (Laura Harring) after spotting a poster for Gilda. Conventions are being employed and perverted; on one hand there€™s the plucky out-of-towner, on the other a potential femme fatale stricken by that old chestnut, memory loss. The dreamer, be it Diane or David Lynch, has seen a lot of movies, and so have the protagonists, who get caught up in the mystery and eroticism of their adventure, while darkness always threatens to break through. The Hollywood of Mulholland Drive is filtered through the eyes of a) a wide-eyed outsider; b) a head injury victim with no recollection of who she is, c) the dreamer, Diane, whom we can distinguish from Betty, and d) David Lynch. Lynch€™s take on the system is darkly comic; there is the great scene where studio execs desperately try to please a studio head (played by Angelo Badalamenti, the composer, whose brilliant music for the movie evokes unease and isolation). They always give him a different espresso, he always spits it back out. They will never find the right coffee for him, but they will always try. The magical allure of movies and Hollywood is not lost in this take: Betty, the naive observer, is caught up in it, and the casting of the late, great Ann Miller in a small role seems a deliberate evocation of a bygone age. But the Hollywood here is always concealing danger and disappointment, and appears to be run by gangsters. Ironically, however, none of this was originally meant for the cinema, as most of the movie was made as a pilot for an aborted TV series. Lynch found a way to salvage the picture with a terrific, contentious epilogue, wherein Naomi Watts (an unknown when the movie came out) garnered great attention for her transformation from a budding Nancy Drew to a wounded, bitter victim of love. Diane is the dreamer, while Betty is a construction; a remnant of her more innocent past. It could be that she is putting her lover, so successful in real life, through the ringer in her dream to regain a sense of power, or perhaps it€™s conceivable she is dreaming from the point of view of Rita€™s character, and has projected her own image onto a version of herself that she may still believe in, but no one else does. In this final passage, elements and characters from earlier in the picture re-appear in altered, inverted versions of themselves. So, for instance, Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) is in the dream a struggling artist whose world is crumbling around him, while in €˜reality€™ he is smarmy and successful. The relationship between the two women is itself inverted, as the dominated takes charge. In a sense this ties up the movie€™s many loose ends €“ though details such as the blue box probably still fuel passionate arguments €“ and repositions the earlier section as a happy dream with dark harbingers of what is really going on: none darker, or better, than the Club Silencio sequence, where Lynch beautifully shows us images with sound then separates those two elements: a singer passionately sings a Spanish version of Roy Orbison€™s €œCryin€™,€ and her voice carries on after she collapses half way through. It€™s a stunning, haunting sequence about dreams, movies and aesthetics. I have heard the movie criticised as being a series of successful moments that don€™t add up to a cohesive whole, and I understand the criticism to a degree. On first viewing in particular, elements may seem to be thrown in only to be abandoned again, and once the ending is made sense of some viewers may feel it€™s too easy a way of tying up all those elements that would have grown and been elaborated on had the planned TV series taken off. But the more I think about Diane, the dreamer, the more it all works for me, from the jitterbug scene at the start through to the opening of the blue box. She hires a hitman (most of the last section seems to take place before, not after, the dream), then feels guilty and transforms him, in her dream, into an imbecile who €“ in a scene as good as anything Tarantino has done this past decade €“ completely botches a job. She has her heart broken then dreams she is loved. She finds herself masturbating while tears run down her face; she dreams she and Rita/Camilla seduce each other (in one of the most erotic scenes Lynch has filmed). By the time they get to Club Silencio all she can do is cry, for she finally sees how fragile, fleeting and artificial her happiness is. But then what is more artificial than a movie, and where is artificiality celebrated more than in the dark heart of Hollywood?

Quality

David Lynch movies definitely lose something when transposed to a small screen (seeing Eraserhead in the cinema is amongst my favourite movie-going experiences), and the Blu-ray goes some way to redressing this balance. It can€™t quite replace the cinema for me, but on a big screen the image is rich and full of detail. You simply get more lost in the movie, through the crisp picture and particularly the haunting, brilliant soundtrack (of both music and strange, sometimes disturbing sound effects). The overhead shots of the city, in particular, look great.

Extras

It€™s a Studio Canal DVD (the movie, after its demise as a TV project, was saved by French money), and there is an introduction by French critic Thierry Jousse and a very good, analytical documentary called Inside The Blue Box. There€™s a featurette called Road To Mulholland Drive which features the only footage of Lynch on the disc; it€™s an on-set account of the filming of the movie€™s €˜epilogue€™ (filmed a year and a half after the rest of the movie). There are also interviews with Lynch€™s editor, Mary Sweeney, and composer Angelo Badalamenti. Studio Canal's Mulholland Drive is available on Blu-ray from today.