Tag: David Lynch

Lost Highway – 25th anniversary 4k restoration

Posted on by victorfraga

A man is at a house party. His name is Fred Madison. He’s handsome, but he feels out of place. He doesn’t think he’s hip enough for the younger crowd. He’s a jazz musician, so probably can’t appreciate the pounding groove of the dance music playing loudly. His wife is also flirting madly with the host of the party. He goes to the bar for a drink. In walks another man. He’s much older, he’s dressed in all-black, his hair is parted expertly down the middle and slicked to each side. His skin is pasty white, and he has no eyebrows. Fred gives the man a curious look. Oh no, eye contact has been made. Fred quickly looks away, but the other man keeps his eyes fixed on Fred and casually walks over with a huge smile on his face and wide eyes. The music in the background suddenly drops in volume. “We’ve met before, haven’t we?” the man asks Fred. Fred can’t recall ever meeting this strange-looking man. And this guy is impossible to forget.

And so, begins one of the strangest and most alluringly hypnotic scenes in cinema. This comes from David Lynch’s 1997 neo-noir Lost Highway, which is currently flabbergasting audiences with a gorgeous 4k restoration. The conversation the two men have goes nowhere. An absurdist back and forth. It doesn’t tell the audience anything about the narrative as such, but it does give the impression of how we’re meant to feel for the remainder of the film. Disturbed, uneasy, confused, weirded out, immersed, amused, and even vulnerable. All these things all at once. The scene, like the whole film, is a fever dream and only really makes sense in that context when all context is ripped away. The man, simply referred to as the ‘Mystery Man’ never stops smiling throughout the whole exchange, even when delivering sinister threats.

The plot is simple. Fred (Bill Pullman) answers his intercom buzzer one morning to a man’s voice informing him that “Dick Laurent is dead.” Fred and his wife Renee Madison (Patricia Arquette) then begin to receive videotapes that contain recorded footage of the outside of their house. As more tapes arrive, more and more footage is revealed, until one tape shows the couple asleep in bed. They call the police to investigate the tapes and attend a house party to take their minds off the events. Fred has a weird conversation with a mysterious man (Robert Blake). See above. Eventually a videotape arrives that has Fred screaming and crying over Renee’s bloody corpse. Fred is arrested for murder and sentenced to death. While in his cell he is inexplicably replaced by a handsome younger man named Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty). Pete is collected by his parents and returns home. Eventually he returns to his job as a car mechanic. Pete is also a personal mechanic to Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia), who is known as Dick Laurent, a local gangster, and porn aficionado. Pete begins a passionate relationship with Eddy’s girlfriend Alice Wakefield (also played by Patricia Arquette in a blonde wig).

When their relationship is discovered by Mr. Eddy, Pete and Alice rob a wealthy pornographer and go on the run. With their stash of stolen loot, they head out to the desert to find Alice’s fence (the Mystery Man from our earlier discussion) who can sell the goods for them. In the desert they have sex on the sand. Pete then turns back into Fred. Fred finds Mr. Eddy and with the help of the Mystery Man kills him by slashing his throat. Fred then returns to his home and whispers into the intercom that “Dick Laurent is dead.”

See, simple. If you ignore the unexplained identity shifts, the way most of the characters seem locked in a psychogenic fugue, and the way the film unfolds like a Möbius loop it’s almost fit for an episode of Columbo or Murder, She Wrote.

Lost Highway is a strange concoction. It implores you to go along with it and explore and unlock the mystery it presents. It gives you all the tools you need, all the clues are there in the film. It also throws so many forks in the road, so many destabilizing moments and performances that what you think you know about the film suddenly proves incorrect. Or maybe you’re just overthinking it. It’s a mystery film in a genre sense, but also a mystery film in its layered complexity. It never fully unlocks.

I remember the first time I watched Lost Highway. It was sometime in the early 2000s. I was on a Lynchian trip after seeing Blue Velvet (1986) and my housemate at the time had purchased a VHS copy from the sale bin in the local Virgin Megastore. We’d had several beers and decided to watch the film as it struck close to 11pm on a Saturday night. My housemate was asleep within ten minutes and caught up in a dream that probably made more sense than what was unfolding and baffling me on screen. I was paralysed, mostly in fear, but also in wonderment at the images and sound and the sense of dread the film instilled. Like the fixed grin that remains on the Mystery Man’s face. I was just as locked in a wide-eyed expression of terror and glee.

I retired to bed sometime past 1am. I didn’t sleep. How could I? Unused and unknown parts of my brain were fired up. The next morning, I tried to explain the film (quite badly) to my hungover housemate. They seemed relieved to have missed it.

Watching the 4k restoration on the big screen gave me a similar experience to that first time around. It’s a thing of absolute beauty. The shadows and light are exquisite. The soundtrack is penetrative. Heavenly verses of Song to the Siren by This Mortal Coil drift in and sooth while the grinding belabor of Nine Inch Nails and Rammstein leap out. The abstract and stilted performances are harrowing, yet also absurd and funny as if a laugh track should have been employed after every line much like Lynch would do later for his absurdist short film series Rabbits (2002). My cheeks and jaw ached like hell the next day from the permanent grin fixed to my face while in rapture of the film.

I don’t really care about trying to make sense of Lost Highway or trying to unpick its sublime mystery. I don’t need it explained to me why Fred suddenly and inexplicably changes mid-way through into Pete. It’s confusing as it is perfectly reasonable for a film that wants you to remain on the knife-edge of unnerved. I like that a film can interpretated in many wats and that its author doesn’t care clarify the actual meaning or events that take place. It means the film is ours in some way. I want Lost Highway to remain obtuse and unreadable. Sometimes we just need things to stop making sense. Like the world we live in.

“We’ve met before, haven’t we?” Yes, it was intoxicating and weird, but I’ll see you again. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

A 4K restoration of Lost Highway has toured selected US and UK cinemas in the past couple of months. Stay tuned for a ultra-HD Blu-ray release.

Drive (Pulsión)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

This Argentinan short, although computer generated, has the feel of stop-motion. It brings to mind work by Lars Von Trier, the Brothers Quay, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch. A narrative conveyed by a series of disturbing vignettes (think: the opening minutes of Melancholia (Lars Von Trier, 2011) is put together with the same kind of fastidious technical attention to detail you find in the Quay Brothers’ films. A couple of scenes borrow directly from one of the murders in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), but in a clever way that shocks you much as those scenes in Psycho originally did. There’s a Lynchian feel about the whole thing – not just in the strange, quasi-industrial sounds recalling Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977) or the weird lighting and heavily controlled mise-en-scène, but also in the overall feel of strange and terrible things happening within families and local communities, people adrift within the darkness of human existence.

One single viewing is not enough for this film which really only reveals itself on repeated viewings. There’s so much going on here in the characters of a father, a mother, a teenage boy and flashbacks to the teenager as a small baby. After the death of the father who is run over while drunk, the relationship between the son and the mother moves into abuse as she hits him for not eating his food and voyeurism as he spies on her through her bedroom keyhole, referencing similar scenarios in Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986) and, again, Psycho. Added to the mix are an animal corpse, a gratuitous rabbit killing and human murders. One particularly shocking scene involves the boy’s estranged friend kissing a girl near an abandoned, wrecked car and the boy hurling a brick at the amorous couple from behind a wall.

The vignettes make the locations appear as model sets suspended in darkness, each built upon a square patch of ground lifted from a wider Cartesian grid. These scenes don’t just appear then disappear in time, their appearance is also isolated spatially from everything around them. It’s an extremely unsettling experience and a unique, highly idiosyncratic vision. One can imagine Casavecchia going on to further forays short or feature length, animation or live action. If he does start working in live action, I hope he keeps returning to animation too because his use of the medium is part of the reason the film works as well as it does here – and it feels as if he has a great deal more to offer audiences.

Drive (Pulsión) played in Annecy where it won a jury distinction for powerful storytelling. Watch the film trailer below:

Orphée

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) was a self-styled ‘poet’, a versatile, avant-garde French artist who worked across a number of different media – novels, visual art, design, theatre, cinema as well as poetry. 1950’s Orphée is one of his most celebrated films. And rightly so.

Famed poet Orphée (Jean Marais) is going through a bad creative patch when newcomer rival Cégeste (Edouard Dermithe) is killed by two speeding, leather-clad motorcycle riders. Orphée becomes obsessed with messages transmitted over the radio of the car belonging to Cégeste’s patron the Princess (Maria Casarès) which seem to him better than any lines he’s written recently.

So obsessed with these broadcasts does Orphée become that he fails to pay enough attention to his wife Eurydice (Marie Déa) who becomes increasingly restless. Every night as he sleeps, the Princess – who a voiceover (read by Jean Cocteau himself) informs us is actually Orphée’s death – visits his room through his wardrobe mirror to watch over him. When Eurydice dies following her too being hit by the motorcyclists, Orphée must venture through the mirror and across the Zone to get her back from the underworld. But once there, he’s confronted by a panel of men judging the Princess for trying to seduce him into going there…

It’s a fairly basic production by today’s standards. The director’s understanding of the mythology is profoundly inventive. Cocteau’s ideas easily transcend not only its budgetary limitations, but also the contemporary 1950 French café society setting in which it was made. As well as the motorcycling Angels of Death, some of the amazing visuals include running the camera backwards so that, for example, dead people are resurrected for their journey into the underworld by reverse falling from horizontal on a bed to an upright standing position. People travel through the surface of mirrors, with one extraordinary close up image created by rubber-gloved hands being plunged into a vat of mercury, a special effect that would probably not be allowed today for health and safety reasons. And in the Zone, Orphée and the Princess’ chauffeur Heurtebise (François Périer) pull themselves along walls as if climbing or are sucked past them as if towards a vacuum.

Orphée is an extraordinary special effects fest, underpinned by Cocteau’s poetic sensibility, storytelling ability and visual flair. There’s no obvious reason why such seemingly extraneous material of radio messages such as “a glass of water illuminates the world” should make such an impression on both Orphée and us, but they do. Once we realise that not only is the Princess in love with Orphée but Heurtebise has fallen for Eurydice, we sympathise with each of them in their various plights as well. Plus, the film is packed with incredible images that, once seen, aren’t easily expunged from your head.

It doesn’t hurt that Cocteau knows how to cast actors who are visually striking in addition to giving compelling performances. Leading man Jean Marais is just as memorable in Orphée as he is in full beast make-up in the director’s earlier Beauty and the Beast (1946) while Maria Casarès is both elegant and enigmatic as Death.

You could beef up the effects by spending more money – but Cocteau’s inventiveness with the minimal resources available to him remains more impressive than most if not all contemporary megabudget movies. In the cinema of magic, mythmaking and enchantment, Cocteau has no equal and has left a lasting imprint on film cuture. You can see Orphée‘s influence in works as diverse as Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) and Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977). Orphée’s pursuit of the Princess who vanishes into thin air in a colonnade anticipates the sequence in Vertigo where the pursued woman vanishes into thin air in the McKittrick Hotel, not to mention the setting of a colonnade at the Spanish Mission later on. And the dogtooth pattern on Orphée’s bedroom floor prefigures the one in the protagonist’s dream in Eraserhead, not to mention the room where the dwarf appears in Lynch’s subsequent TV series Twin Peaks (1990-91).

Society has changed a lot since the 1950s. You might think the relationships in the film would benefit from being more explicit, but somehow the lack of bodily flesh on display here adds to the film’s charm: why be explicit when you can do it all with subtle hints and suggestion? The one area where the film might be made differently today is in its portrayal of women. If the strong willed Princess is impressive enough, Eurydice does little beyond pine for her husband and desire to make him happy. Also, the committee that sits in judgement on the Princess consists entirely of men, whereas today one would include both sexes. And although Cocteau himself was openly homosexual (no-one used the word ‘gay’ in his lifetime), there are no LGBT characters as such here. Perhaps in today’s more open society he’d have realised his characters slightly differently.

Nevertheless, there’s really nothing else in cinema quite like Orphée just as there’s really no-one else in the wider world of the arts quite like Jean Cocteau. Orphée is just as dazzling today as it was when first released two thirds of a century ago. The BFI’s new 2K restoration of this classic in cinemas provides the perfect opportunity either to revisit it for the umpteenth time or to view it for the very first.

Orphée is out in the UK on Friday, October 19th. Watch the BFI’s brand new film trailer below:

It’s also showing as part of Fantastique: The Dream Worlds of French Cinema

at BFI Southbank from Tuesday, October 23rd to the end of November

and a Jean Cocteau retrospective at the Institut français

from Tuesday, October 23rd to Sunday, November 18th.

David Lynch gets Lifetime Award and answers our dirty questions

Posted on by victorfraga

It was a foggy morning in Rome last Saturday. The stone pines were obscured in the horizon by a very Lynchian haze. I came to the festival listening to the Sycamore Trees’ song and I almost mistook the stone pines from Rome with the trees from Twins Peaks: Firewalk with Me (1992). Then, just like the episode 8 of television series Twin Peaks: The Return, there was a bright light shining in the sky. It was not a nuclear bomb; it was just the sun. I instantly felt ready for a whole day of enlightenment.

I had some questions in my mind, and it was a challenge to elaborate them. Lynch doesn’t like meeting journalists and he avoids explaining his films. In fact, the start of the press conference was a series of almost monosyllabic answers. He dodged a question about Harvey Weinstein with a succinct “stay tuned”. Lynch rarely comments on politics and controversial issues. Instead he tends to drive conversations in a more abstract direction, talking the evolution of the human being and the importance of art.

Our dirty questions

Soon the mic landed on my lap and I popped a question: “your actors always mention that there is a feeling of trust on set. They trust you and you trust them. At the same time, you are in the control of the whole filming process. How do you balance trust and control?”

Lynch promptly replied: “you control the people you trust. The whole thing is to be true to an idea. We talk and talk until we realise that we are all going together on the same road.” Indeed, Lynch’s method on set is based on rehearsals, not improvisations. He continues: “when I first meet the actors in the studio most often their interpretation can differ from what I had in mind. So we do a few rehearsals and we get there in the end.#

Lynch’s creative process is solidly based on Transcendental Meditation, which he has been practising for 44 years. So I asked him: “how does meditation help in your work?”. He gave me a surprisingly detailed answer, suggesting he’s perhaps in his comfort zone: “meditation is connected with creativity. There is a lot of stress and negativity in the world. Transcendental Meditation is a key that opens the doors to creativity. Stress, sorrow and depression kill creativity. In the deepest level we are all one. Meditation brings us back to our home, to our Self. This is our future. One day we will all enjoy enlightenment. Suffering is not necessary. The artist does not need to suffer in order to show suffering“.

For sure meditation gives Lynch a state of satisfaction that is rare in artists. Artists most often hate to watch their films again, and are often dissatisfied with the outcome. With the exception of Dune (1984), a film that “I did not have the final cut”, Lynch enjoys all his movies.

The conversation with the journalists ends up with compliments to David Bowie and Harry Dean Stanton, both artists had passed away recently and collaborated in his films. We then had a three hour interval – Lynch went to an ostentatious lunch, and Italian coffee of course — and then everyone returned to the Award Ceremony.

A lifetime in the pictures

The second part of the day, which was also to the public, began with scenes from Eraserhead (1977) and something entirely new to me. Lynch explained : “My greatest inspiration for Eraserhead was the city of Philadelphia. I love it because it’s dirty, filthy and violent.” He then goes on to talk about each of his other movies. He confirmed exactly what I wrote earlier this yes: that Mulholland Drive (2001) is indeed a tribute to Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950). He adds that Sunset is a “sad film about longing”. Indeed both titles of the films are name of locations.

“Gordon Cole is a character in Sunset Boulevard and also in Twin Peaks. In LA, if you want to go towards Paramount Studios, you will pass two streets: Gordon Street and Cole Street. I am sure Billy Wilder got the name from the locations. Wilder had a sense of place.”

Lynch also remembered the two occasions in which he met Federico Fellini in Rome. The last time they saw each other was two days before Fellini entered a coma. They had a nice conversation about the changes in cinema.

At the end of the night, Italian director Paolo Sorrentino came up on stage. He delivered the Lifetime Achievement Award to the 71-year-old-year director from Montana. A much deserved and timely recognition!

David Lynch: The Art Life

Posted on by victorfraga

Explore David Lynch’s very first rumblings of creativity all the way to the wondrous early years as a filmmaker. Filmed over a four year period and funded via Kickstarter, David Lynch: The Art Life opens up the method and process of Lynch’s artistic works, and offers a portrait of Lynch as someone who was, and still is, deeply alert to the possibilities of living the creative life.

The doc is meditative in its approach. Mostly we see Lynch working quietly in his Hollywood Hills studio wearing his loose professorial slacks and button-up shirt, applying paints, fixing up models and twisting wire that will be incorporated into the finished products. On occasion we see old photos and 8mm footage of a young Lynch larking around with his family and friends. Over the top of all this, Lynch narrates and reminisces on a childhood spent moving from one city to another. Although his family was uprooted many times due to his father’s work as a research scientist, Lynch describes his childhood in idyllic terms. Sunny days spent making wooden guns and playing cowboys.

He then talks of his introduction to art and artistic practice through friends and colleagues, and the prolific production of paintings he endured before he began to find his artistic mojo. He then laments over his experiences of attending the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia during his late teens and early 20s. Experiences that were equally frustrating and exhilarating. The evolution of Lynch’s work is vivid. He breaches abstract painting to moving images quickly, spurred on by wishing to see his own artwork adopt movement and sound. His move to Los Angeles and his acceptance into the American Film Institute Conservatory were the turning point in Lynch’s artistry. His live action abstract films, The Alphabet (1968) and The Grandmother (1970) sent Lynch on the road to becoming the filmmaker he is today.

Throughout the film, Lynch recalls fragments of his early life that have inevitably bled into his artistic work. Perhaps most effectively, he recalls the moment a naked middle-aged woman walked across her lawn, bloodied and crying, while Lynch played with his younger brother in their sweet suburban neighbourhood . In the story he tells, the young Lynch wants to help the woman, but he’s too juvenile to understand the crisis, whilst his younger brother just begins to sob at the sight.The juxtaposition of childhood innocence and the viciousness of the adult world is something Lynch would apply and explore in his film work. In fact, this scene would play out later in Blue Velvet (1986), when the mysterious Dorothy Valens (Isabella Rossilini) stumbles naked and bruised across the suburban lawn. This is just one example from Lynch of life bleeding into art and vice versa.

The film is also gorgeously shot and edited. Frames of a quiet, thoughtful, and aging Lynch sipping a coffee and surrounded by clouds of cigarette smoke illuminated by sunlight are mesmerising to watch. During these moments of reflection, the layers of Lynch begin peel back to reveal something very human and even fragile – something that is mostly absent in his public persona as an avant-garde filmmaker. No other voice is included in the film, only Lynch tells his story and every frame either has him in it or has a product of his artistic work.

The movie concludes just as Lynch is working on his debut film, Eraserhead (1977), a production period that would last over half a decade and see Lynch experience early fatherhood and divorce from his wife Peggy. Whilst personal triumph and trauma is left off the agenda, this period of time in Lynch’s life is transitional in terms of his art and his foray into filmmaking. Eraserhead could be seen as the accumulation of artistic knowledge that Lynch garnered during his formative years laid bare. It’s clear that Lynch recalls Eraserhead and indeed the time of its production as the purest embodiment of his art.

The freedom that he was allowed to craft his film during this time would rarely be replicated in future film productions as he began to be embraced by Hollywood and be responsible for million dollar budgets and the production of a commercial commodity. Lynch experienced barely any interference at all from AFI profs and certainly no studio executives were knocking on his door. This allowed Lynch to strive, to fail and ultimately to learn the language of film and incorporate his artistic background without dilution. Though it’s not as if Lynch has made many compromises since becoming a filmmaker. His directorial work Eraserhead has remained daring, abstract, strident, frightening, and life-affirming, and it is to his credit that Lynch can produce abstract fever dreams that play in movie theatres and are syndicated for television.

Those disappointed that the documentary concludes just as the directorial work begins, and films such as Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks (1992), and Mullholland Drive (2001) are left unexplored and in fact go unmentioned, should take comfort in that the film endeavours to explore and connect the process of the early art works with the contemporary works in cinema. It connects the younger impressionable Lynch with his older, wiser self. It could be said that in Lynch’s world the methods of creativity and artistic integrity can be applied to the any medium. Be it painting, sculpture, musical composition or film, the places where they come from, the memories and experiences gained in life, are one and the same.

David Lynch: The Art Life provides an unflinching and in-depth portrait of a fascinating artist whose life and art have merged to create something truly unique. The film is out in selected UK cinemas on July 14th, 2017.

This is not the only recent documentary dealing with the legendary filmmaker: click here for our review of Peter Braatz’s Blue Velvet Revisited (2016).

Mulholland Drive is a very dirty La La Land

Posted on by victorfraga

Blah blah Land. Another film about glamorous and sunny California. All works fine. Your dream is possible. Everything is possible if you work hard. Even flying! Hollywood couldn’t be possibly be any more spurious and fabricated. The Oscar blunder are a gentle reminder of how phony and fallible it can be. When I think of Los Angeles, I picture its darkest, gloomy side and the long and winding roads. When I think of Los Angeles, I don’t think of the dreamy La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2017). I remember the gloomy David Lynch classic Mulholland Drive (2002), which was voted the best film of the 21st century by a BBC Culture poll last year and has just been rereleased in cinemas across the country.

Lynch’s references to Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) and the decadent film star have much more to do with reality than the unrealistic picture of stardom that we see in La La Land. I can relate to a character that doesn’t know who she is and picks a name from a picture, as Laura Harrindon does when she calls herself Rita (Hayworth). I cannot relate myself to a singer who thinks of her aunt during her audition. Emma Stone singing “here’s to the fools who dream” is an insult to me. I am a dreamer and I am not a fool!

Below I have contrasted the two films: the formulaic 2017 musical against the 2002 dirty cult film. In a nutshell, I think that Mulholland Drive is a filthy and subversive La La Land. Or the other way around: La La Land is a clean and sanitised version of Mulholland Drive. Here are the reasons why:

…

1. Complex mindset VS easy dream:

In both films, an actress is trying to break into Hollywood, yet they couldn’t be more different. In Mulholland Drive, Betty/Diane (Naomi Watts) arrives in town with high expectations. Her eyes look so fascinated by everything that surrounds her. She hopes her days of fame will soon begin, but what Lynch says to us is that there is more fantasy than reality in her aspirations. On the other hand, Mia (Emma Stone) of La La Land is a cafe waitress who goes from audition to audition seeking her role of dreams. She eventually succeeds.

In Lynch’s world, it’s the struggle in the mind of the actress that matters. Is Betty dreaming high? Does she have any talent? Can she compromise? In Chazelle’s fantasy land, what’s important is that if you try hard, you’ll be successful. It’s the fulfilling of the American dream. Dream on, little dreamer.

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Living the dream: everything is wonderful and glitzy in La La Land.

2. Real music VS fake music:

Mulholland Drive is not a musical, but the film is solidly built around musical numbers. There’s the song that appears in the audition Betty goes, which refers to Doris Day’s filmography. There’s also the beautiful and cathartic number on the Club Silencio. The songs reveal the transformation of the characters and link them to their inner self. The characters don’t lie to us when there is music around. They reveal themselves instead.

La La Land is entirely a musical, that supposedly celebrates jazz, as Ryan Gosling’s character (Sebastian) is a jazz musician. He claims he loves free jazz and is determined to show Mia what jazz truly is. Only that the main theme of the film is not a jazz composition. Seb can’t write jazz. In reality, it is a little waltz. (Yes, it is!) There is nothing jazzy and cool in La La Land. La La Land exploits jazz.

3. Strong women VS frail women:

Mulholland Drive is all about Betty and who she truly is. The unrelenting search for success has turned her into an invidious, jealous and mean woman. She cannot stand the fact that Camilla/Rita (Laura Harring) took her part in the musical. So she seduces her. It’s never clear though if she really gets that woman, or if it’s all part of her paranoia.

In La La Land, the plot is far less complicated. Mia doesn’t follow hard enough her ambitions. She almost gives up being an actress and returns to her parent’s house just because she broke up with Seb. On the second part of the film, she is more a mother than an artist. This is why Lynch is more edgy than Chazelle. Lynch’s women are stronger than Chazelle’s. They don’t function according to men’s desire.

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Strong and robust women are the centrepiece of Mulholland Drive.

4. Edifying diversity VS confused diversity

La La Land opening scene offers the diversity Chazelle wants to show, though Los Angeles consists of individuals from more than 140 nations, speaking 224 recognised languages. The Latins, Blacks, Whites and Asians are all at the same social level. They are all struck in a traffic jam, they all have cars. There is also a bad taste joke about Latin culture, revealing a confusion between Brazilian and Hispanic cultures. Sebastian’s favorite jazz club will be demolished and on its place there will be a “Samba Tapas Club”. Tapas don’t come from Brazil; and jazz is not superior to samba, they are just different.

In Mulholland Drive, Betty and Camilla are empathetic of Latin culture as they both fall into tears during the Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison’s Crying. The musical number contrasts truth and illusion. Here the diversity serves for the purpose of turning Americans into more sensitive human beings.

5. Non-linear narrative VS linear narrative

Lynch’s style of storytelling is non-linear. He comes and goes, mixes flashbacks with flashforwards, with some objects and characters suddenly reappearing in order to reveal a secret. It is as creative and unpredictable as life itself. La La Land tries to play a trick by faking a non-linear narrative. It shows a sequence which suggests what could have happened if Seb and Mia hadn’t broken up. In reality, this is just a breather, so viewers can resume dreaming of a happy ending shortly after.

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Everything is colourful and everyone is jolly in La La Land.

6. Dirty sex VS sanitised sex

Let’s face it: you can’t get frisky with the love sequences between Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. They are not even naked! Taste the lesbian flare of Naomi Watts and Laura Harring instead. They will get much closer to your sexual fantasies, rest assured. Here’s what Harring declared about filming the sequence: “Even though I was nervous, he [Lynch] does everything with class. He knows how to get people to react – and without any special effects”.