David Lynch (2001)
Often beguiling to watch but to write about it is something else. In 2001, Mulholland Drive screened at the Cannes festival (where David Lynch shared the Best Director prize) before opening in American cinemas in mid-October. A piece in Salon the same month[1] is perhaps the earliest detailed analysis of this complex, confounding psychological thriller; if you Google ‘Mulholland Drive explained’ you get an idea of how many analyses have followed. I’m chickening out of this one. I can’t write a halfway intelligent summary – not at least without watching the film again (and, probably, again). This note is hardly more than a record of having seen it.
BFI was showing Mulholland Drive – set in contemporary Los Angeles but probably at different levels of reality too – in their ‘Big Screen Classics’ slot. It was coincidence I booked to see it just a few days after Persona in the Bergman retrospective. I knew that two young women were the principals in Lynch’s film too; I didn’t know that shifting identity – Persona-fication, if you like – was at the heart of it. Both main actresses, Laura Elena Harring and Naomi Watts, play two characters – or, perhaps, a single character and its alter ego. (In each case, one version of the character has considerably more screen time than the other has.) Lynch’s leads echo their Swedish antecedents in that Harring (like Liv Ullmann) has an enigmatic, iconic quality while Watts (like Bibi Andersson) is vitally individual. In what proved to be her breakthrough role(s), Naomi Watts creates truly remarkable contrasts between the aspiring actress Betty Elms, a radiantly optimistic chatterbox, and the depressed, overshadowed Diane Selwyn, with her bad teeth and sallow complexion. My favourite scene in the film is the one in which Betty goes to read for a part and does so – to the surprise of the other characters on screen and the film audience too – grippingly well.
12 January 2018
[1] https://www.salon.com/2001/10/24/mulholland_drive_analysis/
