lynch makes a collage of his previous work

Rating: 6/10 (12 July 2002)

Don't get me wrong, I am a great admirer of Lynch's work. Not just his beautifully strange haunting films, but his painting and photography as well. I have seen Lost Highway at least five times and it still intrigues me. I think Eraserhead is one of the scariest cult horrors I have seen. The calming beauty of Straight Story couldn't have been captured by anyone else but Lynch. The image of Bob from Twin Peaks can stil make me shiver thinking about it... but... Mulholland Drive didn't do those things for me.
I think it is Lynch's most overrated work so far. When these other films came out people were probably not ready for them yet. When Mulholland Drive came out, I guess they were, so it was hauled by the press and audience as something they had never seen before. And this is exactly where I think the film gets stuck!
I almost feel bad giving this critical review, but I feel by doing this I am actually doing credit to the genius of Lynch's mind. Although I'm not sure if the man himself would agree! I think Lynch could do better. Let me start by saying that I did enjoy the film. The atmosphere was still beautiful dreamy like. It did miss the nightmarish dimension of Lost Highway though. Maybe cuz Betty, even when she turns darker, was so annoyingly nice and sweet. There was a fair amount of your regular dry humor and some of the characters managed to give me the creeps for a moment, be it that they never had a deeper function.
The plot itself soon lost my interest. Maybe cuz I already knew the trick not to look for a binding thread too much. You know with Lost Highway I still look for a missing piece of the puzzle, but in Mulholland Drive there are so many missing pieces you soon give up. Maybe it's not fair that I'm comparing this film to Lost Highway so much, but what can you expect when even the music, pretty decisive in creating the atmosphere, was identical at times.
Then there was the dwarf we know from Twin Peaks. Didn't Lynch have any new ideas of creating some other crazily disturbing characters? As if he put them in for people unfamiliar with his work. Or is Mulholland Drive an ode, a collage, to what he did before. An ode out of the mind of some disturbed girl with a multiple personality syndrome?
We know Lynch has a very typical way of handling the camera, which was one of the reasons to make a film with such a common story as The Straight Story still so beautiful and strange. The camerawork of Mulholland Drive was too identical to Lost Highway though, but not as effective. I didn't get any goosebumps. I just felt dreamily entertained for two and a half hours.
The love scenes between Rita and Betty were nice and seemed sincere. Their relationship as a whole was convincing. That's were I liked the twist in the plot. But then a lot of the rest seemed kind of useless entourage. I don't know but Mulholland Drive really disappointed me coming out of this brilliant mind, I'm sorry to say...