1175 Inland Empire

[Lino]

Oh, dear! So a film critic doesn't understand what a Lynch film is about! Does this mean that the world is soon coming to its end?! Oh, dear! Please say it isn't so! I don't want to die either if I don't understand it!

Seriously, folks -- I've always had a hard time with people that go to the movies expecting things to be spelt out for them in big letters. I have friends like these that supposedly like cinema but when they encounter something that leads them off on the wrong track or something (aka something that actually makes them think for a while!) they completely dismiss it and instantaneously start labeling it as incomprehensible or (heavens forbid!) bad!

Lost Highway for me was hard to get into at first and I admit I was one of the people that actually thought Lynch was making fun of me and everyone else that went to see it. How dared he create such an enigmatic piece of work that screamed genius at me and made me feel like a first grader all over again? But with time, I have come to see it as perhaps the cornerstone of the new direction he's since taken and a very daring one it is. It's like he's been on that Lost Highway ever since (one that only he knows the roads that lead there) and frankly, we should be thankful that such roadmaps are being created, cinematic wise.

Can anyone really, fully, wholly understand what Zerkalo is all about? Of course not. That's not really the point, anyway! And in Lynch's case, it's all about the journey. Just like in life.

[The Invunche]

This is gonna be murder on the people who couldn't follow The Descent.

[rs98762001]

Lynch's latest, which he spent two-and-a-half years filming on and off – and with no script – begins intriguingly enough, apparently promising a dark mystery along the lines of Mulholland Drive or Lost Highway. But in those tastily bizarre earlier films, you always felt that you could puzzle out the whole thing if only you watched them enough times. With INLAND EMPIRE – and yes, that's how it's spelt - we soon begin to suspect that there's nothing to solve.

Personally, that's exactly why I don't like those films as much as, say, FWWM, which is explicitly about this same idea: that all signifiers contain only the meanings we graft onto them, and can only be limited by our lack of insight and imagination.

It's also hilarious considering it's the same critics that, when they reviewed MD or LH, initially dismissed them for not being as linear and straightforward as BLUE VELVET or WILD AT HEART.

The Times just called it "one of the most impenetrable films ever made." That's a hell of a compliment, although I don't think they meant it that way.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

The Times just called it "one of the most impenetrable films ever made." That's a hell of a compliment, although I don't think they meant it that way.

And let's not forget the infamous Lost Highway poster that proudly proclaimed "Two thumbs down." from Siskel & Ebert. Heh, I always liked that.

Also, photos and audio from the Venice Film Festival Press Conference.

[kinjitsu]

GreenCine Daily:

Venice. Inland Empire.

Ok, so we knew David Lynch would be receiving a lifetime achievement Golden Lion award in Venice, and that he did, but what we've been dying to hear about is Inland Empire. So far, all critics seem able to agree on two things: the new film is enigmatic as hell and it's three hours long. continued...

Movie City Indie:

Lynch's latest: "It's supposed to make perfect sense"

David Lynch gets a Golden Lion lifetime award in Venice today, and of his new movie, Inland Empire, writes Reuters, "the master of mystery and the macabre is more impenetrable than ever, prompting a journalist to jokingly ask after his mental health." continued...

[Fletch F. Fletch]

My favorite bit is from The London Times:

[quote]Lynch clearly had no intention of enlightening them, even when one critic said: “I have to ask you with a certain concern, how are you these days?â€

[Barmy]

I just PRAY Lynch is not signed up to direct The Descent II.

[Antoine Doinel]

That would actually be a huge improvement.

[soma]

The Guardian review is up:

Inspired and incomprehensible, a Russian doll of a film

Inland Empire

Geoffrey Macnab

David Lynch's latest opus is a Russian doll of a film with stories inside stories inside stories. But coming in at three hours long, made in Poland and Hollywood, the digitally-shot film is inspired and incomprehensible by turns.

Laura Dern (who also co-produced) stars as an actress who has just landed a part in a new film. What the producers have neglected to tell her is that the movie is a remake and that the two original leads were murdered. Now, history looks set to repeat itself.

Narrative coherence has never been much of a concern for Lynch. Here, disconcertingly, there are sequences (not explained at all) involving a family on stage in rabbit heads as well as a murky sub-plot about eastern European prostitutes. Hollywood myth and Polish Gypsy folk tale clash head-on with startling but very uneven effect. The director deliberately blurs the lines and so we are never quite sure whether we are watching the film-within-the-film (being directed by Jeremy Irons) or the film about the film-within-the-film.

In among the non-sequiturs, Lynch fans will find plenty to relish. As he has shown in films from Eraserhead to Lost Highway, he is a master at cranking up the tension and making his audience feel a queasy sense of impending doom. The soundtrack crackles with jarring, eerie noises. There are sweaty close-ups, shots in blurred black and white, and jumpy cuts.

Between times, there are celebrity cameos from old Lynch chums and plenty of his morbid humour. Harry Dean Stanton has a wonderful walk-on part as an old-time Hollywood exec who shamelessly sponges from associates. Grace Zabriskie is terrifying in a Cruella De Vil-like fashion as Dern's neighbour.

Two hours in, you begin to realise it is pointless trying to unravel the mysteries of the plot. The best way to enjoy the film is to succumb to its warped, dream-like logic. Thankfully, the estimable Dern, in her third feature with Lynch after Blue Velvet and Wild At Heart, holds Inland Empire together as the one character with any emotional depth. In some scenes, she plays a well-bred actress, in others a foul-mouthed street whore. Lynch puts her through the wringer. She is terrorised and stabbed with a screwdriver, but never loses poise or conviction.

Film festival organisers yesterday gave Lynch, 60, the lifetime achievement Golden Lion award for a career which has included The Elephant Man and the Twin Peaks TV series.

[miless]

I can't wait to see it... like many of Lynch's films, it sounds like a dream (or, perhaps more appropriately, a nightmare) and I think that it sounds fascinating, as dreams rarely make sense when reviewed upon awakening.

[dadaistnun]

That blog I linked to before now has nice scans of the press book.

[Barmy]

I am anxious to see it, but am concerned about the negative comments on the image quality. I don't care if it is incomprehensibe (ala The Descent) or not, but it needs to have Lynchtastic cinematography.

[Antoine Doinel]

I don't care if it is incomprehensibe (ala The Descent)

Dude, that joke is so played.

[gubbelsj]

Lynch chats a bit about meditation and DV in today's NYTimes.

[John Cope]

Ed Gonzalez gets our hopes up over at Slant:

David Lynch's new film is many things, among them a sinister waltz through a So-Cal underbelly known as Inland Empire, a murder mystery, a movie-within-a-movie-within-so-on, and the story of love affairs that span the boundaries of time, space, reason, and sexual identity. It is happening again, you may think (or dread—Lynch, after all, has his haters): a redux of Mulholland Drive, which is only half true. Perform a post-mortem on this three-hour beast of a film and you will find only half a heart beating inside its chest, but you will also discover innards that coil in more grandiose directions. Mulholland Drive, possibly the greatest work of American film art since Altman's Nashville, is an impossible act for Lynch to have to follow, but the bug-eyed director—pupils dilated and imagination tripping in almost inconceivable directions—has made the Atlas Shrugged of narrative avant-garde films, compulsively watchable and insanely self-devouring.

Seeing Inland Empire bright and early on a Sunday morning for the first time—a second, very necessary viewing already awaits—was not unlike slipping into a nightmarish reverie not long after my equally prolonged adventures in REM sleep the night prior, which, incidentally, accommodated a screening of a Lynch movie that was not at all similar to this extraordinary freak-out. There is a very clean divide in Mulholland Drive between a woman's dreams and waking life, but the walls between the two are completely dissolved in the more fragmentary Inland Empire, Lynch's most self-reflexive creation to date. The director has vowed never to work on film again, and for this, his first feature shot on digital video, he lobs a cherry bomb at his entire canon, recording the jagged remnants that resonate from the blast as they slide and dissipate into the swirl of his projector beam. Some may call it a toilet, but I like to think of it as a splendiferous whirlpool of wonders.

Where to begin? At the end, perhaps, with the word sweet, Inland Empire's answer to Mulholland Drive's silencio, though sweetness is not a feeling Inland Empire exactly radiates. Much earlier, a nosy neighbor played by Grace Zabriskie (possibly on the same crazy pills Fiona Shaw took for The Black Dahlia) walks into the home of an actress, Nikki (Laura Dern), in order to rant and rave about the younger woman having "it": the part of Sue in a remake of "a Polish gypsy story" titled 4/7 that was never finished because two of its actresses were gruesomely murdered (the American version, directed by Jeremy Irons's Kinglsey, goes by the Sirkian title Blue Tomorrows). Zabriskie's nosy interloper, like Lee Grant's Louise Bonner from Mulholland Drive, ostensibly sees into the future, offering an implicit warning—to Nikki but also to Lynch's audience—that time is about to collapse on itself, leaving identities crushed and blurred almost beyond recognition.

Inland Empire is totally fucked up, picking up reception from wavelengths past and present and places here and there, sometimes from Lynch's own short work: the story's hilarious white-trash scenes are essentially live-action variations of the director's Dumbland series, and Rabbits, an anthology of shots starring Laura Harring, Naomi Watts, and Scott Coffey as sitcom rabbits possibly waiting for Godot, is fascinatingly incorporated into this film's metaverse. (This time when their phone rings there's someone on the other end, and when their door opens someone walks through.) From her own den of frustration, a Polish prostitute—in footage, perhaps, from 4/7—watches Rabbits, whose canned laughter undermines the woman's fit of busy tears. These shorts act as one of many exciting portals in the film through which characters cross between worlds, and what is Inland Empire in the end but a hall with walls equipped with barbed rabbit holes, each one daring us to peek through, possibly even to take a plunge inside?

You may ask what the film's stream of non sequiturs, anecdotes, clues, doublings, folktales, and psychotic episodes mean. We could say nothing and declare that Inland Empire doesn't so much fall into the abyss as it resides in it, telegraphing dizzying sounds and visions from its drowned world toward the outside, which should suffice as an explanation if you've learned to respect the fact that Lynch carves his films much closer to where our id resides than anyone has ever dared. Lynch, more honestly than Godard, embraces the dark and dingy contours of the DV format, which reflect Nikki's bumpy journey into an underground of obsession and madness: She goes after her married co-star Devon (Justin Theroux), thinking he is really Billy, the character he plays in Blue Tomorrows, screaming for him not unlike Irene Miracle does when she flashes Brad Davis her breasts in Midnight Express, only Nikki's stalking is an obvious diversion.

Lynch indulges familiar fixations, risking the pretentiousness of Ghost World's Nearer, Father, Nearer video, but he's serious about getting beneath his main character's skin, and Dern works fiercely with the director to send us blistering imprints of how Nikki's consciousness filters itself into her unconsciousness and then back again. Dern's is the performance of her career, a spectacle of freakish facial expressions, primal screams, and howling monologues; like Watts in Mulholland Drive, she is not afraid to get ugly for her art. She is a mess of hurt trying to find herself, but what she ultimately finds, like Watts and Harring do inside the club Silencio, is something close to rapture—self-respect and bicultural empathy. More viewings will, no doubt, suss out new riches, possibly even clear up or muddle what has already been revealed. Until then, it goes unsaid that anyone who prefers the way tripe like Little Children spoon-feeds its audience will not care to scale the walls of this intimidating magnum opus.

[godardslave]

sounds fucking awesome.

[Titus]

A less insightful but nonetheless enthusiastic article from Jürgen Fauth:

[quote]A Wicked Dream that Seizes the Heart

How do you review someone else's bad dream? This Sunday morning at the New York Film Festival, insomniacs and hardcore cinephiles assembled to see David Lynch's first movie in five years. His latest plumbing of the unconscious is three hours long and his first to be shot on digital video, but not the first featuring Laura Dern (Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart), shifting identities, and creepy characters doing truly creepy things. There's a spooky Russian neighbor who mumbles veiled threats into the fish eye lens, and then William H. Macy announces: “Hollywood, California, where stars make dreams and dreams make stars!â€

[John Cope]

From d+kaz; Jesus, this is a really good review:

[quote]David Lynch's filmography made a significant transition with Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), his prequel to the television series, first by centering the narrative on a woman, then by embodying the subjectivity of the woman in the form of the film, and resulting, finally, in a fragmented and expressionist narrative used for exploring the story of a severely damaged woman. Although the director returned to a male protagonist in his next film, Lost Highway (1997), it further pushed the degree to which a conventional protagonist-centered storyline could be warped by the psychic pressures on its hero, and Mulholland Dr. (2001) picked this thread back up and returned to the female subject that first so fascinated and challenged Lynch's style. This trajectory reaches its apex in Inland Empire, a work that integrates Lynch's direction of increased narrative subservience to the impulses of an unsure consciousness and his emotionally wrought and far more personal films centered on disturbed female subjects with the director's original—and still thriving, albeit in on the internet—predilection for experimental cinema. Inland Empire finds a perfect match in harkening back to the avant-garde aesthetics of Eraserhead and Lynch's student short films at the same time it embraces the director's contemporary explorations of subjective storytelling.

This storytelling, as inscrutable and impenetrable as it often may be, is supremely rooted in the fractured psyches of Lynch's protagonists. Like Laura Palmer before her, Laura Dern's Sue of Inland Empire is introduced to us as a woman already existing between the line of life and death, both in the process of death and of seeing a rupture between herself and the world around her that displaces and destabilizes her sense of self and its place in the world. Although Fire Walk With Me was rooted in the after-effects of a victim of rape and incest, and Betty/Diane in Mulholland Dr. in traumatic gap between expectation and reality, in Inland Empire, more than any other Lynch feature, the sources of the woman's trauma is obscured. But of its heart that it loses in its lack of specificity, it gains in its empathetic abstraction, its emphasis on barely-defined terror. It seems to have something to do with the burdens of roles places on Sue, who starts the film out as a married, once-famous actress about to make her comeback made by a notable director (Jeremy Irons) and starring Billy (Justin Theroux) as the man with whom she cheats on her husband. But almost immediately the roles cross over: Sue is both the woman, married and perhaps in love with Billy, and the actress playing the married woman and in love with the role Billy plays. Her husband speaks ominously to Billy that his wife Sue is “boundâ€

[Andre Jurieu]

Not Coming to a Theater Near You has a couple of reviews for the film:

Our own Leo Goldsmith and Jenny Jediny.

[Barmy]

I smell Oscar®!

[tavernier]

I smell Oscar®!

So it's going to be that bad, huh?

[denti alligator]

My wife can't make it with me to the 11:30am showing on Monday, so I have an extra ticket. If interested, pm me.

[John Cope]

StudioCanal has evidently pulled IE out of the Sitges Film Fest. There are rumors that it's being cut. I hope they're just rumors.

[Lino]

StudioCanal has evidently pulled IE out of the Sitges Film Fest. There are rumors that it's being cut. I hope they're just rumors.

Here we go. Wild at Heart all over again, just like I previously dreaded...

[miless]

Here we go. Wild at Heart all over again, just like I previously dreaded...

yeah, they're going to add fog to a scene where Willem Defoe shoots his head off?