Guardian, January 4th 2002

Driven to distraction

David Lynch´s new film may be weird, says Peter Bradshaw, but it´s also hugely enjoyable

Film of the Week

Mulholland Drive

**** (out of *****)

To watch this creepy, fascinating, dreamily selfindulgent picture is to experience a pang of nostalgia for 10 years ago - for the television sensation that was Twin Peaks. Before Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino and Spike Jonze, David Lynch´s Twin Peaks was the funky state of the art and, along with Coupland´s Generation X, helped to introduce the postmodern as a fashionable 1990s mannerism on both sides of the Atlantic.

Famously, Twin Peaks became a bad movie; Mulholland Drive has been forced to go in the same direction with much better results. The salvaged version of a cancelled TV show, it often seems like the concatenation of six or so episodes. There are elements of transcendent weirdness that were obviously intended to settle into the viewing public´s consciousness over the life-cycle of a TV-series, elements that were intended to amass their own vitality and cult status over a million water-cooler moments. Forced to give a plausible account of themselves from scratch in the space of a feature film, each of these constituent elements is under far more pressure.

The narrative of Mulholland Drive, uproariously weird as it is, actually make a baggy sort of sense, but its plot impetus and structural integrity all have a somnambulist feel.. It´s not surreal, precisely, but has a Dali-soft-watch sense of time that stems from the heroine´s amnesia - and which stubbornly persists even after the return of her memory.

There is plenty of sex and violence: bizarre accidental shootings, a bleeding young woman staggering around after a car wreck (a favourite Lynch image), a woman punched in the face by a simian wiseguy, and some girl-on-girl sex action enlived by very funny dialogue. In the hands of another director, these events would have hard, aggressive slicing edges. But Lynch contrives to fill them with helium like funny-shaped balloons and float them past the screen.

We start with a beautiful young woman played by Laura Elena Harring - a graduate of that other postmodern TV extravaganza, Sunset Beach - staggering from the back of a limo on LA´s Mulholland Drive after what appears to be an assassination attempt, interrupted by another car crashing into them. She has lost her memory and, her face a silent mask of Maria Callas-like frozen despair, finds her way into the apartment of another young Tinselton hopeful, Betty Elms, played by the British-born Australian actress Naomi Watts. Feisty amateur sleuth that she is, Betty does everything to help her uninvited guest get her memory back - and then falls passionately in love with her.

It is here that Lynch and his characters fall through the looking glass into a new dimension: Betty and the amnesiac young woman, who calls herself "Rita" after Rita Hayworth, now appear to be different people, but not completely different. Betty is Diane Selwyn, a young actress, the gay lover of Rita´s new persona, Camilla Rhodes, a successful star who is preparing to dump Diane for a young director whose new project is funded by mafia types. Devastated with jealous rage, she arranges to have her lover killed - which is where we came in.

Confused? The reality depends on which side of the looking glass we are standing. Looking forward, "Betty" is granted a vision of where infatuation and failure colud lead, or looking backward, the movie´s first part is the final anguished, transfiguring dream of "Diane".

There will be many for whom all this will be a tiresome throwback to Lynch´s earlier work, especially as there are longuers, redundancies and jigsaw pieces which have to be furiously hammered before they can fit anywhere. But it has an extraordinary atmosphere, filled with a loopy, spacey persuasiveness; it has a lush visual invention, a yearning score, and a genial cameo by Hollywood veteran Ann Miller.

Above all, it has a top-notch, all-stops-out, bells-ringing, lights-flashing star performance from Naomi Watts as the ingenue from Ontario whose life is radically changed. In particular, Watts has a brilliant sequence in which she rehearses a melodramatic audition piece with her new best friend Rita and then, on the day, does it in a completely different, steamily inspired way in a close clinch with her putative co-star. It is a deliciously clever scene, and worth the price of admission on its own.

Granted, this is a familiar-looking, even retrogressive work from Lynch, after his style had appeared to branch out with The Straight Story two years ago. And movie-goers used to the cocaine rush of films like Magnolia or Pulp Fiction may be disinclined to spliff up with Lynch for consciousness-altering meander up into the Hollywood Hills. But they really should. Because the view is very enjoyable.