The Big Picture: Mulholland Drive (15)

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David Lynch: Odd Man Out

Jonathan Romney's review

An amnesiac brunette totters away from a car wreck like a broken doll. An innocent blonde helps her in the search for her missing identity. A hotshot film director somehow gets involved with both of them. Add a dwarf, a cowboy, a couple of miniature pensioners and something nasty lurking round the corner of a breakfast joint, stir together these elements until they have the consistency of a moody LA noir, then leave to set (this may take some time). Welcome to Lynchland: you may have been lost here before.

Mulholland Drive continues a journey into the dark that David Lynch started somewhere around the archly inscrutable Twin Peaks. Indeed, the film began life as a pilot for a television series until the station had a look at it and promptly baled out. Might this explain its languorous pace and vanishing plotlines? To a degree, though one should never underestimate this director's perversity, or his mischievous love of bamboozlement. Like Lost Highway (1997), his most recent excursion into neon Gothic, Mulholland Drive is a tease, a trip, a horrible dream, or a combination of all three – whatever it is, you will spend a good deal of time just trying to hold its pieces together in your head.

The film takes off from a strange meeting. Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) is a starry-eyed ingénue just arrived in Hollywood and staying in the apartment of an absent aunt; she assumed the place was empty, but out of the bathroom emerges a dark-haired vamp (Laura Elena Harring) with a vacant look in her eyes, and no wonder – she's just survived a car crash on Mulholland Drive and misplaced her memory. Obliged to introduce herself to Betty, she spies an old poster for Gilda and says that her name is Rita, as in Hayworth, which, as troubled females go, isn't a bad fit. (The film is, among other things, an echo chamber of movie references.)

The two women turn detective, though the clues they pick up only serve to dim visibility a notch or two further. First, there's an apartment they bluff their way into; tiptoeing into the bedroom they find – whoa! – a rotting corpse. Then, back home, they find themselves – make that another "whoa!" – melting into each other's arms. It's a sort of climax to the voluptuous unease Lynch has been stirring up all along: the shady lady, the inquisitive blonde – hell, why not get them together? "Have you ever done this before?" Betty asks. "I don't know," Rita replies, making the line quiver with erotic possibility.

The point being: we hardly know what we're capable of. Just as Kyle MacLachlan's gallant naïf in Blue Velvet found himself able to hurt Isabella Rossellini for sexual kicks, so Betty and Rita are thoroughly confounded by their unsuspected attraction. One wonders, not for the first time, how much this has to do with role-playing. Rita, the amnesiac, must improvise her character as she goes along; Betty, the aspiring actress, wants to make impersonation her living. Lynch illustrates the shifting sands of realism and make-believe in a pair of complementary scenes. When Betty tries out her audition speech at home with Rita, the dialogue sounds hollow and stilted; later, she does the audition with an actor, and nails the lines with such lubricious conviction that her audience (director, producer, agent) look quite stunned. She seems to be acting in a trance, which, in this movie's hallucinatory scheme, could be what everybody else is doing.

The film gains no clearer definition in the narrative running parallel to Betty and Rita's investigations. Adam (Justin Theroux) is a film director coping with domestic and professional combustion: his wife has thrown him out, and the studio is strong-arming him into hiring a specific actress for his latest project. The meeting at which this demand is outlined is played as if it were a menacing farce, with the studio underlings cowering obsequiously before the brass, one of whom spits out his espresso in a grand flourish of disgust. The sequence feels like a distillation of all that we've been told about the bottom-line brutishness of moneymen, but here as elsewhere the digs at the cynicism of the Hollywood machine don't lead anywhere, and aren't particularly original in any case. (They come over a bit like The Player, minus the jokes.)

As an exercise in dislocation and misdirection, Mulholland Drive is out on its own, which may be a good thing and a bad thing. (Hey, two can play at this ambiguity business). Pondering the movie a couple of weeks after seeing it, certain images float around the mind like imprints from a dream. The two actresses, for instance, are filmed in swooning close-up so often that you couldn't forget their faces even if you tried. Some sequences are a typical Lynch compound of horror and farce, like the scene that begins with two men talking in an office and erupts into what may be the messiest hit in movies: in trying to rig the murder scene to look like a suicide, the killer not only shoots two unfortunate bystanders but also sets off a vacuum cleaner in the process. I suspect we're meant to laugh.

Yet whatever the warped potency of individual scenes and moments, it's extraordinarily difficult to remember in what order, or even why, they occurred. Whether Lynch himself knows exactly what's going on is a moot point, but it seems unarguable that he'd prefer to keep his audience guessing. One has a (very) tentative hold on things when, in the last half-hour, the introduction of a "blue key" turns the plot on its head and what appeared certainties gradually slip through the fingers. Refusing cogency, Lynch breaks up the film into a kind of noir jigsaw, and challenges us to put it back together. Is it an enjoyable experience? I hardly know: in two-and-a-half hours I didn't once glance at my watch, and felt glad that there are still film-makers who like to make pictures without the concomitant obligation to make sense. But while it's absorbing and spooky, it's also pretty unsatisfying. That's the way it is in Lynchland, a place where you remain, in more ways than one, in the dark.