"Mulholland Dr." at the crossroad between fantasy and reality, illusion and disillusion, conventional cinema... and David Lynch!

Rating: 10/10 (22 December 2017)

Last night I had the strangest dream no, I didn't sail away to China but let's just say that dream was far more exciting than the day that started when I woke up.
Hitchcock said cinema was "life without the dull bits". In a way, dreams play like an "internal cinema", they're emotional, haunting, 'entertaining' to some degree and naturally, they're mysterious. And their mysteries are of the toughest sort because they can only provide clues, not explanations, hints, not signals, and sometimes we just wake up and we don't even have time to reassemble the pieces of the puzzle. If there ever is a puzzle, which is even more puzzling!
If films played like dreams, movie theaters would serve aspirin tablets instead of popcorn, we live in a time where what most viewers seeks is an experience with a meaning, a point, a plot or enough visual hyperbolas to hook our eyes onto. Cinema has become so ambitious on a technical level yet so simple intellectually, only challenging you when it handles timely or socially relevant themes. It does immerse you into a new world, it does ask some suspension of disbelief but let's face it, a very few directors have ever touched the 'essence' of dreams. David Lynch did and he did it magnificently in "Mulholland Dr.", certainly his masterpiece.
The film isn't a mystery: it is, quoting Lisa Simpson, herself quoting Churchill: "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma". There is a narrative in the sense that it's Lynch telling us a story but no matter how hard you try to focus on the 'plot', there comes a moment where you realize it isn't just about what you think you're seeing, but the unseen these things you're watching are hinting at, it's another level of comprehension. It's not even asking for comprehension but a genuine desire to embrace the film's mood and it's so lavishly done that any movie lover would enjoy this film. It starts by trying to separate between the real, the dream and the subconscious until you discover how symbiotically they all interact on a cinematic level.
In other words, this is surrealism at its finest.
For the sake of the review, I'll mention that it's about two women, a voluptuous and enigmatic brunette (Laura Harring), and a young idealistic blonde starlet (Naomi Watts). Their identities vary less misleading you than warning you over taking the "mystery" too literally. For a mystery to be valid, it has to exist within a coherent and seemingly constant universe. If I had to compare the film with another classic, it would be "The Wizard of Oz". Lynch made many more explicit references in "Wild at Heart" but in "Mulholland Dr.", it works even better on a subtler level, characters exist within two worlds, the reality and the dream, and like in "Oz", the way they act in reality affect their 'status' within the dream.
Whose dream are we talking about? I don't feel like spoiling the experience at that point. But let's say Lynch has a unique aesthetic approach through his subtle hints, don't take their weirdness as artistic licenses, they all have a reason to exist even in a state of non-existence. And like a real guide into a dark corridor of strange visions, Lynch provides unforgettable transitions, so stylish anyone would take them as "all flash and no substance", stuff with lampshades, phones, voices, déjà-vu situations, characters who seem totally disconnected with the story, but once you reassemble the pieces, you realize that within that strangeness, something is making sense. There is a puzzle, after all. Lynch is the Wizard of Oz, but unlike the original, you should pay attention to the man behind the (red) curtain. And it goes even deeper than that.
The duplicity of characters evokes a universal reality and "Mulholland Dr" deserves more credit for that: it shows that we don't exist on our own, on a sole layer, we are what we are, also what we wish we could be and sometimes, jealousy or envy can drive us into re-evaluating our past or reenacting it or visualizing again with a "best case" scenario. There are two worlds intertwining, one to see through rose-tainted glasses, illusion, and a darker one, disillusion. This 'explains' the genre-bending approach: it plays like a romantic thriller, soap-opera, slapstick or horror. But Lynch doesn't treat them like genres but steps in a mind's journey, from the heights of idealization to the abysses of deception. And in-between, you've got the subconscious, and I can't think of another director that gave that abstraction a visual reality. Maybe Buñuel.
Lynch is more divisive, and I don't think I enjoyed his previous movies with the same passion but "Mulholland Dr." comforted me that it's not his weirdness or wildness that disturbed me but how the effects played in the whole picture. "Mulholland Dr." had such a hypnotic beauty that I didn't mind the 'obscure' moments, I was just drawn to it, and In watched it three times in a row... and I feel like I only got the tip of the iceberg, like for "Blue Velvet", you don't get "Mulholland Dr.", you get it. Unfairly overlooked by the Oscars, Naomi Watts magnificently embodied two states of minds, one about the 'illusion' of Hollywood and one about the disillusion. Yes, the film has also a saying about Hollywood, the dream and what's behind.
The film only received one Oscar nod, but so deserved, because this is one of the rare instances where the directing tells the story, and although the word has been hackneyed, one can see in Lynch, love him or hate him, a true auteur in the imagery, the text, the subtext and the spirit. And "Mulholland Dr." is a crossover between "Memento", "An Andalu Dog" and "Sunset Blvd.", a surrealistic masterpiece, a Lynchian masterpiece.
Now, I've said enough, from now on, it's...Silencio!