Lynch's Hindu Riddle? A Shockless bore or absurd masterpiece

Rating: 9/10 (8 November 2001)

Lynch Soup
Car Crashes, Caffeine and Concussions and here we are again, back in David Lynchs ultra- creative head. His new movie Mulholland Drive defies logic and depending on how you define entertaining, this could be his absurdist masterpiece or a complete shockless bore.
Lately, Lynch toggles between two extreme movie-making formulas, either Stop Making sense scene after scene (Lost Highway)or dole out a linear narrative at an unhurried paint-drying pace, like The Straight Story. One things certain: he's testing his audience, albeit splitting them into polar groups of love him , hate him camps.
This is Lynchs variation of Bergmans' Persona, an actresses search for identity, yet it's truly his. There's the postmodernism, the homoeroticism, the amnesia, the versatility and range of experience and performance and last but not least the TRAUMA that bisects the film in half leaving characters and the audience in a sort of communal concussion. While Bergmans film is much more dour, Lynch throws in his absurd fatalism usually in the form of a frightening-comic Establishment, pulling the red curtain strings in an almost ironic vaudevillian/50s fashion. The movie's driven by two female characters, one an amnesiac (Laura Harring) who was just about to be murdered in a limosine, and two the innocent aspiring actress from Deep River, Ontario who finds her (Naomi Watts).
(You have one sentence to leave this review. The rest has spoilers.)
What follows next, are various subplots that never seem to connect, and a confounding Hindu riddle that goes too far. If only this could have been the ABC series David Lynch envisioned it to be, yet ABC shelved it 1999, it may have had the restraint, nuance and To be continued nature of an episode. Instead, we're left with a cynical metaphysical letter to Hollywood. Up to that point Lynch is masterful at having that abysmal unknown along the Nite-blue Los Angeles fault line compel us curiously, deftly balancing between absurdity, curiosity and comedy, not to mention the entire cast seems to want to play along. Up to that point Angelo Badlamenti's score understates and punctuates with synthesized stabs, and swashes and giddy lounge numbers. Up to that point it's Lynchs' best movie.