Mulholland Drive is David Lynch's masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (14 March 2002)

********** SPOILER ALERT *********
In real life, Mulholland Drive is a circuitous road that glides atop the beautiful Hollywood Hills. By day, the road provides some of the most astonishing views of Los Angeles. By night, however, the road can be one of the most hazardous imaginable. One moment you can be riding along with ease, the next moment, you can be caught in a blind curve. The film is a lot like the road itself. It has moments of rare beauty--images that haunt you for days after you leave the theatre. And it has images so shattering that you wish you could forget them, but you can't.
Naomi Watts plays the dual role of Betty Elms/Diane Selwyn in the film, a neo-noir with a biting edge.
The first portion of the film focuses on the dream-like ideal experiences of Betty, a young, beautiful ingenue. (It is only later that we discover Betty is a projection, the dream-self of the destitute failed actress Diane Selwyn.) In her dream, Betty arrives fresh from Deep River, Ontario to stay at her aunt's beautiful Hollywood apartment. An aspiring actress, Betty finds herself caught up in a mystery when a gorgeous and sultry amnesiac (played by Latin beauty Laura Elena Harring) who has narrowly escaped death, finds her way into her aunt's apartment. Betty asks the beautiful stranger her name. Not knowing the answer, she sees a movie poster for "Gilda," starring Rita Hayworth, and decides to call herself "Rita." (The irony here is that in more ways than one, the amnesiac "Rita" becomes a kind of "Gilda" femme fatale figure who ultimately torments and betrays "Betty.") Betty, wanting only to help Rita, gladly takes her in and the two women set out to find Rita's "true" identity.
At the center of the film is the slowly evolving relationship between the two women. The relationship (as it is initially portrayed in the dream sequence of the film) is one in which both women fall madly in love with one another. And, the apex of the story occurs when they make passionate love in what is surely one of the most gorgeous love scenes ever filmed.
After they make love, the narrative focus shifts and we are introduced to Betty's doppelganger, Diane Selwyn. With the narrative shift, we realize that the first portion of the film is Diane's dream, a dream in which she recalls herself as she once may have been....an aspiring screen hopeful with stars in her eyes...a romanticist who believed she could find love and succeed, but who in reality is now a lonely, tormented and fading "B" actress whose ship never sailed. The stark reality of Diane's story is that she did indeed sleep with beautiful "Rita," (who in reality is named "Camilla.") She slept with her in order to get help with landing roles, but she fell in love with her along the way. However, in true femme fatale form, we see that Camilla not only does not help her, but simply uses her for sex, drops her, and marries the director who rejected Diane for the role that could have been her big "break." Diane is devastated, and in her crisis of identity, she cries out for a reality that might justify her lost dreams.
Ultimately, the film is hauntingly beautiful. It takes us on a ride through the land of dreams and shows us, like Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard," the dark underbelly of Hollywood....a place haunted by the shattered dreams of once-hopeful young would-be stars. As Wilder's classic noir and Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" show, for every star that is on the walk of fame, there are a million others that never make it.
In a year almost devoid of eroticism or even mystery, this movie echoes back to a time when filmmakers were unashamed to show the power and the beauty of physical attraction and the mysterious dualities of love/hate, passion/power, rejection/acceptance. The eroticism of the film is both innocent and highly-charged. Not since the lost days of cinematic sexuality echoed throughout the 1980s in films like "Body Heat," "Damage," "The Postman Always Rings Twice," has a film generated this much heat.
The film is subtle and unique in its interpretation of identity and love. In terms of originality, it surpasses any other film in 2001. Watts' performance as both hopeful ingenue and jaded Hollywood "B" actress is in a word, phenomenal. She is able to move seamlessly between the polar opposites of character that are required in this complex, bifarcated role.