Time, Times and HalfTimes

Rating: Null/10 (26 October 2001)

Marienbad meets Timecode.
Spoilers herein.
Here, we have lots of elements found in other intelligent films:
-- A film about a film. (The opening scene of this, the outer movie -- a sock hop -- is part of the content of the inner movie the director is making. That only a few dancing couples are present but in multiple copies is our tipoff of things to come.)
-- An actress playing a character who is an actress who creates an actress.
-- A relatively fresh story built entirely of cliches from film history, including some from Lynch's own
-- A lush, languid, meditative camera with many POVs, clearly letting us know this is a character's vision.
--Time shuffling, time folding and parallel universes; a by now common convention that late narrative revelations reinvent the earlier narration.
--A traditional chorus, here in three forms -- all imagined jointly by the characters and you (which is the standard approach, only these chori wear masks, shrink bodily and participate in background conspiracies).
--Movie sex: real, imagined and acted, consisting exclusively of facial intercourse superficially annotated by breast exposure (which makes it as much sex with the viewer).
Usually, a critical mass of these makes a film worth watching regardless of whether it is particularly artful or effective. This film is slightly artful, though obviously that's subjective. But it IS a very effective mystery, and that's the real hook. There has long been a problem with transforming the literary mystery to cinema. The written mystery depends on the wandering mind, loose control of the writer over the reader's digestion of the narrative. The game is one in which the writer (tries to) manage the leash and the reader (tries to) outwit the incomplete history by filling things in. Because with reading you create your own images, you are already in control of the world.
Cinema is different. You don't control the images, only the recognition and registration. The writer/reader leash is short. So we are still seeing experiments in how this can be expressed in film. Mulholland is a drive through one approach, literally sketched by the drive: a ride to a party which stops midway and takes a shortcut, a shortcut which reconstructs the drive as interrupted in a different way, an interruption that is `explained' several times.
The key forms of the mystery remain, starting with a setup establishing an apparent question. One finds later that the question is of course the wrong one. Some dueling among the writer, viewer and characters occurs (adding the characters to this mix is generally limited to film). Then everything is explained. The value in this film is the duel, and how it is shaped. Terrific stuff in conception.
My only real problem was how clean was the resolution -- was wrapped up with a little too much order for me. A tough call: a clear solution is required for the mystery form but some greater chaos is required for the art. (But I still worry about that third call.)