Festival de Cannes 72 Countdown: Mulholland Drive, 2001

We excitedly countdown to the 72nd Festival de Cannes with a different prize winning film each day.

Mulholland Drive, 2001

Prix de la mise en scène – David Lynch

Why does Mulholland Drive work?

That’s the question that consumed me on this, my most recent re-watch of David Lynch’s modern classic neo-noir dream mystery. Even that description belies the pitfalls that, on paper, should trip up this film. There are many competing elements at play. Characters come into the story that seem too fantastical to accept. Many films have attempted to wrestle with the notion of dreams, but none of them have done it as well as Mulholland Drive. Why?

The answer, I believe, is the reason that Lynch won the Prix de la mise en scene Award (Best Director) at the 54^th Cannes Film Festival (an award he shared with Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn’t There). Lynch also received an Academy Award nomination for Best Director for his work on the film. In his direction of Mulholland Drive, Lynch shows his incomparable adherence to his idea.

Describing the plot of Mulholland Drive must be one of the great hurdles for film critics to pass, and I will give my best effort here. It is clear that this is a film obsessed with dreams and the lengths one might go to achieve them. The film begins with an eerie dance scene before we see a woman (Laura Elena Harring) who is involved in a car accident. She hobbles away and hides out in the home of a woman (Maya Bond) who seems to be leaving on a trip.

Then, we meet Betty (Naomi Watts), an aspiring actress just arriving to Los Angeles. It was her Aunt Ruth who was leaving the apartment, and Betty is going to be staying there while she is in L.A. But when she finds the woman from the car accident – who calls herself Rita after seeing a Rita Hayworth poster – it becomes clear that something strange is going on.

There is also a storyline about a director – Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) – attempting to finish his film. Through this storyline, we meet many strange and confusing characters. Who is Mr. Roque (Michael J. Anderson), for instance? I’ve seen the film five times now, and I couldn’t begin to tell you who he is or what relevance he plays to the remainder of the film. It is clear that he is calling the shots somehow, but we’re never really given much to go on. And he isn’t the only character about whom you could say that. At the same time, enough of these ambiguous threads are tied together by the end of the film, that the unanswered questions do not cause you to check out.

“Every single thing in the world that was made by anyone started with an idea. So to catch one that is powerful enough to fall in love with, it is one of the most beautiful experiences. It’s like being jolted with electricity and knowledge at the same time.”

– David Lynch, as quoted in David Lynch: Interviews by Richard A. Barney

Lynch surely must have felt that jolt of electricity throughout the making of Mulholland Drive, for this film is populated with incredible ideas. The sheer number of them is impressive, but there are many films that are able to present multiple great ideas. The more incredible feat in Mulholland Drive is that Lynch follows through and gives a payoff on those fascinating ideas.

One such idea is that things are not as they seem on the surface. In an interview with The Guardian, Lynch tells of a story from his childhood in Montana that I think gives some powerful insight into how he views the world, especially the world of Los Angeles depicted in Mulholland Drive.

“On this cherry tree would be pitch oozing out, some of it black, some of it yellow, and there were millions of red ants racing all over the sticky pitch, all over the tree. So you see, there’s this beautiful world and you just look a little bit closer and there are always red ants underneath.”

There are always red ants underneath. Honestly, that quote could itself be an apt description of this film, in many ways. Entire threads of Mulholland Drive, especially those associated with Hollywood and the movie business, show that beneath the glitz and glamour of the sunlit city there is darkness lurking.

One of the powers of this film is that it elicits real emotion. Some scenes induce fear. In my mind, the best example of this is the first scene that takes place at Winkie’s. Two men (played by Patrick Fischler and Michael Cooke) are sitting down to breakfast. Though we may not recognize it at first, the camera is almost floating in this scene, which adds to the eerie quality. This is one of the many great touches in the film from Lynch and cinematographer Peter Deming.

As one man recounts a frightening dream he had, we realize that he is describing this exact scene. He tells the man that he saw a frightening person behind the restaurant, so they go out to see for themselves. There, around a corner, we are frightened by a street bum whose face is charred and hideous. Here, again, is a character that defies description. What does it all mean?

But fear is not the only emotion present here. There are many scenes of sadness. I’d contend that there are even different kinds of sadness present in the film. What I mean by that is you have some scenes that elicit a gripping sadness that borders on painful. Then there is a scene like the one in the club Silencio, where a man tells us that what we are seeing is an illusion. This happens to be my favorite scene in the film for what comes next.

Rebekah del Rio is brought out onto the stage to sing a Spanish-language rendition of Roy Orbison’s Crying. While she sings, we see the two female leads crying in the audience. There is a sadness present, yet it is infused with the beauty of del Rio’s swelling voice. There’s a sense that beauty and pain can be found in the same place.

Then there are multiple erotic scenes, which seem to depict the erotic dreams of one character about another. While they are quite graphic, they do play a role in the narrative that Lynch weaves. From these scenes we surmise what the relationship between these two characters might actually be, which may be different than the relationship that is first presented to us. Or…maybe not? That is for the viewer to decide.

I love films that have a respect for their audience, and few films have such a high respect for the audience as Mulholland Drive. Plot elements are not spelled out. As confounding as the film may be at times, we are given threads that lead us to the next idea. Lynch has been stalwart in rejecting requests to provide any answers about the film. I’m thankful for that. It allows the audience to come to their own conclusions, and this is a film where two different viewers can come to completely different conclusions.

More than anything, the film returns us to our dreams. When we dream, we attempt to go back and piece things together, but we always fall short. Here we have the advantage of being able to go back to the film time and time again like we wish to do with our dreams. But each time I go back to Mulholland Drive, any answers it gives only produce more questions. The film itself is like a dream. I have seen no other films that have so acutely reproduced this feeling (though Christopher Nolan’s Inception surely comes closest next to this one).

The performances are fantastic. This was Naomi Watts’ breakout role, and you see the star power for which she would later be recognized. Laura Harring is mysterious, and she pulls us deeper and deeper into the spiraling story. There are striking cameo appearances that catch you off-guard at first. But, from top to bottom, the cast does an incredible job.

One other collaborator to note is music composer Angelo Badalamenti. The music fills us with dread, especially the theme music that plays over the film’s title card. Just like the film itself, when that same music is played at other times, it elicits other emotions. But there is always a sadness present.

This film certainly is influenced by films that came before it, most notably Sunset Boulevard and Persona. The road Sunset Blvd. makes a few appearances in the film, and Mulholland Drive’s noir stylings certainly bear resemblance to Billy Wilder’s classic.

However, I think Persona is the film most akin to this one. There, too, you have two women whose identities are unsure. They grapple with pain and emotion, and that film also has threads in which it considers the illusion of movie-making itself. Where Ingmar Bergman’s classic used the burning of the film to show us how movies are one step removed from reality, Lynch uses two scenes of characters reciting lines for an audition to show us that acting and movie-making are illusions.

In the first scene, the lines are read as a second thought. In the second scene, actors dive into the lines. Here Lynch shows that films are a creation among many artists. Later, the scene I mentioned earlier that takes place at the club Silencio underscores this notion of films as an illusion.

It’s very difficult to throw so many storylines into the mix and have them all tie up together and feel supported, but that is exactly what Lynch does. For this incredible feat, he was rightly rewarded at the Cannes Film Festival. Not only that, but he created a film which will be discussed and considered as long as the art form of filmmaking is alive.