Inland Empire
(dir. David Lynch)
Another Mobius (s)trip from the dream world of David Lynch, Inland Empire pulls out from Mulholland Drive and dives off the DL DV deep-end. There's just no-one else making films like this.
Laura Dern holds it all together, in a pretty nuts performance that ranges from high-camp melodrama to neo-realism (sometimes in the same scene). It's up there with Naomi Watts's Mulholland Drive - at times you're checking it's still her because she seems so different throughout her multliple scenes. When you talk about a performance having great range, it's rarely meant in such literal terms.
In one strand, she's Nikki, an actress playing opposite Justin Theroux's Devon in On High In Blue Tomorrows, a film directed by Jeremy Irons (helped by Harry Dean Stanton), that turns out to be a remake of an ill-fated, incomplete movie called 4/7. In another, she's Sue, her character in Blue Tomorrows, who's having an affair w Theroux's character.
Early on, in a tabloid TV interview with Dern's real-life mother (and Wild At Heart co-star) Diane Ladd, she's warned to avoid womaniser Devon's on-set reputation. This is where it all starts to melt into itself, as if both Sue and Nikki are dreaming each other.
Throw in a Polish version of their reality (the original version of the film?), a group of prostitutes hanging out and occasionally bursting into choreographed dance numbers, a bunch of hardware-obsessed circus folk, cameos from Grace "Sarah Palmer" Zabriskie, Julia Ormond, William H Macy, Mary Steenburgen and Lynch himself (Bucky the lighting guy!) and a sitcom starring three rabbits (voiced by Laura Harring, Naomi Watts, and Scott Coffey and based on Rabbits, a 2002 Lynch short), and you've got a classic, unhinged, pure Lynch experience. Baffling, engrossing, funny, dark and moving all at once. It's made all the more exciting by being shot on DV - you get the feeling it's given him a fresh perspective on Lynchland, and suggests that it's a medium that's finally getting an aesthetic of its own.
Inland Empire probably won't win over any new fans, but if you've ever wanted your very own red room, it's a winner.
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23rd Jan 2007 - Tumblr
4.5
