SimonK
Posts: 374
Joined: 25/11/2005
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My review of Inland Empire now up on my website, www.kinnema.com, in a rabbit-themed special that also includes Donnie Darko and Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit!
Inland Empire
(David Lynch, US, 2007)
Established auteur resting on his laurels, right? Wrong. Lynch discovers freedom in digital and go back to (his) basics: memorable, challenging and downright weird
More than any other medium, cinema is regarded as a young man’s game. Unlike writing or painting, where the accumulated experience of the creator’s life becomes part of the package, the practicalities of filmmaking means that directors are unfairly perceived to be burnt out by their mid-forties. The Nineties, with its hunger for finding the next big thing straight out of film school, took this notion to an insane extreme…so it’s comforting to find that the wisdom of age is being recognised again. Pensioners Eastwood, Polanski and Scorsese have all won Oscars this decade, whilst fellow elder statesmen like David Cronenberg and (until his death) Robert Atman have been acclaimed for producing work as good as anything they’ve done.
David Lynch’s name would be on the same list anyway courtesy of Mulholland Dr., but Inland Empire pushes him right to the top: it’s by far and away his weirdest and most uncompromising film, which is saying something. If you didn’t know who Lynch was, you’d swear it was the act of a newcomer burning with avant-garde ambition rather than the work of a master secure in his reputation. But then, if you stretch the definition of a debut, that’s exactly what Inland Empire is, with Lynch discovering the joys of a new medium and finding new ways of doing things.
For the first time, the director is shooting on digital video, and the freedom is startling. On film, Lynch’s instincts have inevitably been tempered by the need to plan some form of structure before committing to expensive celluloid...but when you can just "point and shoot," cheaply and easily, who needs structure? The result feels as organic a translation of Lynch’s mindset as you can get, unravelling as a succession of brilliantly realised scenes and sequences, one rippling into the next. There’s a plot of sorts during the first hour, but after that, you’re on your own.
Lynch takes his cues from Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr. – Doppleganger protagonists, fractured narratives, non-sequitur inserts – to composes an entire film from them. The interludes with rabbit-people apparently living out some kind of Kafkaesque sitcom are the most self-consciously strange, but even more impressive are the effortlessly fluid transitions between the film’s various realities, or the menace Lynch conjures up from an apparently banal conversation between two homeless women.
Visually, the film benefits from the distinctive look that the medium brings. On celluloid, the beauty of the images he conjures up often offsets their primal energy. Not here: the grainy, flickering texture keeps things disconcerting and in the realm of the uncanny, not least when hitched to Lynch‘s typically bravura sound design, the creaks and whistles of a madman. Admittedly, there are times when it feels like a home movie, but in the same way that Curb Your Enthusiasm is: a pared-down, back to basics approach that relies on content to achieve its provocative goals.
The other benefit of shooting on video is one of intimacy, and the cameras get as close up to Laura Dern as it’s possible to get. It’s a logical extension of Naomi Watts’ stunning work in Mulholland Dr., but Dern is arguably more astonishing: a brave, unvarnished scream of a performance, her distinctive features contorting into a mask of horror and sadness at the events around her. Unlike the fairly straightforward demarcation between Watts’ characters, it’s not entirely clear how many roles Dern is playing – or, indeed, whether they are all splintered fragments of the same personality. And her raw, long-take monologues of past traumas with would-be aggressors provide the most compelling and heartstopping moments of the film, no mean feat given the director.
What’s it all about? Honestly? No idea, but there’s a labyrinth of themes to get lost in here, involving the cultural divide between America and Europe, marriage, madness and the thresholds between different worlds. The overriding sense, though, is about how art (and specifically performance) recasts reality, conjuring not just Eastern European curses but collapsing the whole infrastructure of perception into a moveable feast where the same woman can be at once a respected actress, a housewife, a prostitute and possibly even the figment of a viewer‘s imagination. In this sense, the film it resembles most is Persona, a film that similarly shatters our cosy sense of narrative to take a look at what lies beneath the cracks. Inland Empire is as long and undisciplined as Bergman's film was precise and economic, but watch these two back-to-back and you might never be sure of anything again.
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"It's the end...but the moment has been prepared for."
Still writing at www.kinnema.com
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Printable Version
RE: Strange But True - 
David Lynch is the master of mind bending movies,and this is on another level,simply stunning masterful and daring.5/5
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