Lynch's best film

Rating: 10/10 (14 September 2007)

The first time I saw Mullholland Drive, I was impressed by it, but also more than a little confused, like many viewers, specially in the second part of the movie. After watching it two more times, I believe it is a true masterpiece, with a wonderful clockwork screenplay: many things that look arbitrary in a first viewing, came neatly into place after repeated sightings. The movie is structured in two parts (SPOILERS INCLUDED, don't read if you haven't yet seen it): a real part and a dream part. While the real part comes first chronologically, Lynch shows the dream first. In the "real" part, Diane (Naomi Watts) is one of those many girls that arrived in Hollywood from small towns throughout North America dreaming of getting a big break in the silver screen. Unfortunately for her, she is a mediocre actress. In a casting, she meets another actress called Camila (Laura Harring), who gets the main role. They become friends, get to live together, and eventually fall in love. Camila becomes successful in town, and she helps Diane in getting small roles in the movies she stars in. But Camila falls in love with one of her directors, Adam, so she and Diane splits bitterly. Some time later, Camila invites Diane to a party, where she is humiliated by the guests, and becomes silently enraged when Camila and Adam become engaged. In that party, she mets a few individuals (a man with a cowboy hat, Adam's mother) that would later appear in her dreams, in another roles. (Here Lynch deftly understands the logic of dreams, where people one knows usually appear under different names or roles). After the party, Diane hires a hit-man to kill Camila. He tells her that when the job is done, he will drop a blue key under her door. When Diane later finds the key and becomes aware than Camila is dead, she becomes remorseful, and shots herself. As she agonizes between life and death, Diane has a last dream, which is the first part of the movie. In the dream, Diane is the great actress she wishes she has been. As in the real part, she arrives in Hollywood for a movie career, but unlike reality, in the dream she is talented and successful. In her apartment, she founds an amnesic woman (who has the face of Camila). As for Adam, since she hates him for being engaged with Camila, she imagines him in horrible situations, cheated by his wife, being forced by mobsters in making his movies in a way he doesn't like. The cowboy Diane met at the party appears here as scaring Adam into picking another actress for the main role in the movie. The hit-man she hired is presented as impossibly clumsy, perhaps in her secret desire that he didn't do his job well. There are many things more, but I hope you get the idea of the structure present in the movie, and why it is not arbitrary but has its own impeccable logic. This is Lynch's best film, with a superb screenplay, and a nifty understanding of dream logic.