| David Lynch back at Cannes
CANNES, France — (AP) The director
of the sweetly affecting The Straight
Story is back in full David Lynch mode, with all the hallucinatory imagery and
nocturnal oddity you'd expect from the man who created Twin Peaks. Two
years after The Straight Story played the Cannes Film Festival, David Lynch
returned Wednesday for the premiere of his latest, Mulholland Drive. It's a movie
that might be described as Twin Peaks goes to the big city.
Set in Los Angeles, Mulholland Drive takes its title from the famed
street that winds like a corkscrew through the Hollywood Hills. The
film has as many twists and turns as the street. But Lynch — whose
films include The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and Cannes' 1990
Palme d'Or winner, Wild at Heart — declines to interpret or
summarize it.
In the official Cannes program guide, Mulholland Drive's
description is just seven words: "Love story in the city of dreams."
"My choice. I wrote that line," Lynch said. "Because that's what it's
about to me. And also, there's no paragraph or 17 pages or
whatever that would say what the film says, because it's words. So
it's a little bit absurd to try to say with a short group of words what
two years of work in film is about."
At its simplest, Mulholland Drive is the story of a starstruck woman
who comes to Hollywood hoping to become a movie star, possibly a
great actress, preferably both.
True to the otherworldly style of Twin Peaks, Lynch's new movie
shapes a world that's part dream, nightmare, insanity and parallel
universe, all linked by a heavy dose of harsh reality. The large cast
of odd characters includes a shadowy beast behind a doughnut
shop, a babbling clairvoyant, a menacing cowboy, a gigolo pool
cleaner and a midget in a wheelchair.
At the center are fresh-faced new arrival Betty (Naomi Watts) and
mysterious, ravishing amnesiac Rita (Laura Elena Harring). Thrown
together by chance, the women must solve the puzzle of huge wads
of cash in Rita's handbag and find the lock that a strange blue key
she carries will open. As with Twin Peaks, Lynch's short-lived TV
series and the feature film it spawned, no description could do
justice to the movie's wild convolutions.
"I think all the clues are there for an interpretation, but probably as
many different interpretations as there are people viewing it," Lynch
said. "The mind is so active putting together pieces of puzzles.
That's a valid thing, whatever it comes up with that solves the
problem."
"But people don't want to trust that. They should trust that, because
that mechanism is what gets us through many things in life and leads
to fantastic conclusions."
Mulholland Drive began as a television pilot Lynch was working on
when he came to Cannes in 1999 with The Straight Story, an
uncharacteristically straightforward film about an old man who rides
a lawnmower across two states to visit his ailing brother. The film
earned an Oscar nomination for Richard Farnsworth.
When the TV pilot failed, the cast was reassembled to transform the
pilot into a theatrical movie, which Lynch and his companion and
producing partner, Mary Sweeney, are shopping around the Cannes
film market to distributors. Lynch's films sometimes can be tough
sells because they break so many Hollywood plot and character
conventions.
"People have mixed feelings sometimes and can be a little afraid of
the commercial prospects" Sweeney said. At nearly 2-1/2 hours,
Mulholland Drive also runs longer than most films. The length is
"dictated by what feels correct," said Lynch, who has insisted on
having final say for film cuts since a truncated version of his sci-fi
epic Dune bombed in 1984.
"As soon as you start fiddling with that for any arbitrary reason,
you're kidding yourself. Like they say, it's better to have five
screenings a day with the rooms packed than six with the rooms
empty. So let the film be the way it needs to be, wants to be. It wants
to be a certain way." |