The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Rating: 9/10 (10 June 2019)

David Lynch has an interesting relationship with Hollywood, to say the least. Its clear that he has the utmost respect for classic Hollywood but holds little of this reverence for the Hollywood of today. Its no surprise, therefore, that one of his favorite movies of all time in Billy Wilder's 1950 masterpiece Sunset Boulevard (both this film and that one are, of course, named after roads in Los Angeles.) Betty Elms (Noami Watts) is an aspiring actress who moves to Los Angeles to become a movie star. A basic story so far, though Betty has more than one leg up over the actresses, nannies, clerks, and other girls in the same city with the same dream. Her aunt Ruth (Maya Bond) has more than one amenity for her use, including her old Spanish villa style apartment. Things get serious though when an unnamed dark haired sole survivor of a car accident (Laura Harring) arrives in Betty's new apartment, completely unaware of who she is. Suffering from amnesia, she takes to calling herself Rita after looking at a poster of Rita Hayworth's Gilda (1946) on the wall of the kitchen. The two search for who she really is, eventually with Rita suddenly spitting out the name "Diane Selwyn" as a possible clue. Concurrently Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) is a film director whose latest production has recently been taken over the (I assume) Mafia who pressure him into casting Camilla Rhodes (Melissa George) in the lead role, despite his reluctance. Frustrated by this hostile takeover his production, he takes his anger out on their limousine before driving home to the Stahl house to discover that his wife is having an affair. Taking his anger out on both of them he returns to downtown Los Angeles and stays in what is possibly the sketchiest hotel I've ever seen before being told that his credit card has been canceled. By the second half of the film everything is revealed to be either a dream or an extremely distorted memory had by the real Diane Selwyn (Watts), the real version of who Betty is. Depressed and washed up, Diane is clearly a failed actress, a possible conclusion for Betty. Rita is revealed to be the real Camilla Rhodes, once a partner of Diane who has now largely discarded her for opulence and fame in the Home of the Movies. The film's genius juxtaposing of the good and bad of Hollywood really comes out into play in the two main episodes. The first is clearly a homage to the classic image and the second is what it is/was like in the early 2000s. For example we get glimpses of Betty's aunt's Spanish villa apartment (which are particularly numerous in that part of the town) as well as the apartment complex inhabited by the real Diane proves to show us the point. Mulholland Drive, much like its spiritual predecessor Sunset Boulevard, is the perfect image of Hollywood, for all of its ups and downs.