All a dream? ... Inland Empire
Following its mixed reception at the Venice film festival, David Lynch bought back the distribution rights to his new film Inland Empire from producers Studio Canal, and is now distributing it himself.
It's now playing to full houses on two screens in New York, one uptown and the other in the Village at the newly-refurbished IFC, the trendy new cinema owned by the Independent Film Channel, which was once known as The Waverly, an art-house which had progressively gone to seed and had become a perfect Lynchian environment. Today, the cinema sits uncomfortably between a parade of sex shops and opposite a basketball court where almost as many fights happen as successful scores.
Becoming his own distributor allows Lynch to also sell his own merchandise in the cinemas, so you can now not only watch the movie but also buy special David Lynch-approved and labelled coffee or purchase limited edition DVDs of Lynch's complete short films or the anniversary edition of Eraserhead, previously only available on Lynch's quirky but indispensable website. And coffee is very much needed to enjoy the undiluted David Lynch experience that Inland Empire represents.
The film began as experimental pieces filmed with students at the Lodz Film School in Poland, where Lynch was being feted at the Film Festival, to which the director has added new sequences, many shot on 8mm, hence a fuzzy sense of alienation and discontinuity, and it strongly smacks of improvisation.
Laura Dern, who co-produced, shoulders the whole film in the role of an actor involved in a new project (with a mercurial Jeremy Irons as the director and a mostly mute Harry Dean Stanton at his most laconic and iconic as a lugubrious sidekick from hell). As to whether her onscreen adventures down unending dark corridors always furnished with red velvet constitute a film within a film, or a film within a film within a film, or even the dream of a brutalised Polish prostitute in a hotel room, watching a television screen in which a family of rabbits on a theatre or film set interact in the detached mode of Samuel Beckett, is left wholly to the viewer's imagination.
It is at times boring and tedious, ridiculous (even if the audiences in New York had a strange tendency to laugh at different times from me altogether), strongly over the top with mad whores parading down Hollywood Boulevard and gruesome stabbings galore, followed by excruciatingly long and agonising death scenes (but is she acting or really been harmed?) but always gripping - in an anxious sort of way - which only David Lynch knows how to generate.
Many Past Lynch acolytes and friends make fleeting appearances: Grace Zabriskie, Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Justin Theroux, Dianne Ladd, Julia Ormond, William H Macy and Nastassja Kinski. The soundtrack is essential to the film, whether it's carrying an ominous sense of dread or subverting known songs to sinister effect. The only thing missing are dwarves talking backwards, but the talking rabbits with human bodies easily make up for them in sheer weirdness.
Fascinating, flawed but impossible to keep your eyes off or not keep on thinking about afterwards. The film is two hours 40 minutes long; at times I even yawned but then I also never wanted it to end: the undiluted essence of the David Lynch experience, with or without coffee. And, yes there is a musical log, if you keep your eyes open!
