REVIEWED - INLAND EMPIRE:After three full hours of this new David Lynch film, we are left with a vast tangle of dismantled nightmares. Donald Clarkereviews a film that always appears to be obeying its own paranormal logic.
WHAT'S going on, here? When writing essays on texts that both please and puzzle, students continue to wheel out that Walter Pater quote about all art aspiring to the form of music. If there is any film-maker for whom the shopworn aphorism continues to have relevance it is, surely, David Lynch.
The director's best films - Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Dr - are powered by something more elusive and obscure than narrative.Yet, for all the non-sequiturs, scenes follow one from the other with the puzzling inevitability of a great melody. One may not know why the cowboy molests the film director in Mulholland Dr, but it, nonetheless, seems inconceivable that he would do otherwise.
Inland Empire, shot on low-resolution digital video over several years, may be the most discordant and unharmonious symphony Lynch has yet composed. Whereas the earlier films twang with the dubious sentimentality of 1950s rock'n'roll, this latest venture - surely for the converted alone - squawks and rattles like an extended improvisation by the sort of eastern European jazz musician who might play the violin with a horseshoe.
Blue Velvet and Mulholland Dr offer Lynch dabblers the consolations of genre convention and sumptuous images. Look hard and you will see something of Sunset Boulevard in Inland Empire, but the picture's uncompromising ugliness shows the casual viewer the door with the harsh brutality of a Victorian father casting an errant daughter into the snow.
What's it about? Why are clouds? Who is Field Marshal Penguin? Laura Dern appears as an actress about to take a role in a southern melodrama entitled On High in Blue Tomorrows. Before she makes her way to the set, a sinister neighbour (played by Lynch regular Grace Zabriskie) creeps into her mansion and predicts various colours of death and mayhem. Sure enough, it transpires that the film script is cursed and has already caused the demise of several actors on an earlier production.
When Dern and her co-star, Justin Theroux, begin work with Jeremy Irons, the film's lugubrious director, Inland Empire, already pretty darn peculiar, begins to properly shatter and warp. A sitcom involving profoundly disturbing rabbits shows itself at irregular intervals. We are taken to the Polish city of Lódz, where a prostitute has unfortunate adventures. Dern, who deserves a medal for her gallant performances, turns up in a variety of locations and in a variety of states, few of them happy.
What is going on here? Deprived of even the modicum of order that gave shape to Eraserhead, Inland Empire demands that the audience succumb to mood and texture alone. One can certainly find analogies for America's current inability to connect with the world in the film's title - which actually references an area of southern California - and the final scenes in which one version of Dern vomits on the Hollywood Walk of Fame could be offering a visceral blow to the movie machine.
However, attempts to read sociological meaning into Lynch's automatic writing inevitably lead nowhere. It is the unmistakable grain of the deadened dialogue and the disassociated insouciance with which the characters greet calamity that identifies Inland Empire as the work of America's greatest happy pessimist.
As the film progresses, it becomes ever more unravelled until, after three full hours, we are left with a vast tangle of dismantled nightmares. Yet, bolstered by Lynch's impeccable instinct for the uncanny, Inland Empire always appears to be obeying its own paranormal logic. The director's many enthusiasts will want to get on board. Lynch agnostics should, perhaps, beware. But no feeling person could fail to be taken aback by the clattering, pounding, percussive ambition of this singular project.
"It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art." Walter Pater said that too.
