Interacting with the spectator

Rating: 7/10 (7 May 2004)

In this movie David Lynch follows the same path that gave us "Twin Peaks" or "Lost Highway" with the same criss-cross pattern of appearance and reality, dream (sometimes nightmare) and verity, sanity and madness, humour and drama, sentiment and coldness. But the atmosphere in "Lost Highway" was much more consistent and dense than here, keeping us all the time stuck to our seats in awe and suspense during the whole projection. This movie although made with talent, shows some weak points and some gaps in the story structure and in the criss-cross combination of several stories and possible clues of the plot. As usual in most of Lynch's movies the plot which requires the spectator's complicity to get to a possible solution that he himself can chose and discover in some kind of interaction. Lynch's talent is also present in the slow camera travellings in which it acts like one more character, accompanied by a terrific and obsessingly oppressive sound track making apparently harmless scenes appearing ominous. This style that consists in telling a story in which the conducting thread loses itself and is here and there broken in episodes that seem to have no relation to it, coming to the extreme of an almost complete rupture like it happens here in the last scenes of the movie, has much to do with the technique of the French school of the "nouveau roman" in which each scene has its own value and meaning leaving its interpretation and integration in the global plot to the reader. In short, I think that Lynch doesn't keep in this movie the density of his previous movies but even so it's worth to be seen.