Mulholland Dr.

After the traditional "The Straight Story", David Lynch is back once more with the avant-garde film Mulholland Drive, a fascinating visual poem in the style of "Lost Highway".

The plot is hard to recount, but at the beginning the film looks set to be a dark film noir. The blonde, blue-eyed Betty Elms arrives in Los Angeles to make a career as an actress. She is to stay with her aunt, who is out of town. In the flat Betty surprises a dark-haired beauty who calls herself Rita. Rita has been in a car accident and is suffering from such severe memory loss that she cannot even remember her own name. Betty insists on helping Rita solve the mystery, but it is not that simple.

Another of the film's many plot strands is decidedly more comic, however: the director Adam Kesher is casting his new film. The mafia tries to pressure the film's producers into letting the actress Camilla Rhodes play the lead, but Kesher refuses to be bullied.

What Mulholland Drive has in visual brilliance and eccentric inventiveness, it lacks in narrative weight. One senses that the film is an amputated TV series, for in the first half of the film it teems with subplots and characters who turn up and disappear just as quickly again. Nothing is gained by looking for any coherent logical narrative in Lynch's dreamlike film, and it is both frustrating and surprising when the protagonists change identity along the way, as also happened in "Lost Highway".