"Oh My Golly..."

The Latest From David Lynch Opens at Ciné

originally published April 4, 2007

Described as a "free-fall plunge into David Lynch's imagination..." by the San Francisco Chronicle, the long-simmering vibe of mystery on Inland Empire was amped up by statements like that of Laura Dern, who despite starring in the picture, went to its premiere at last year's Venice Film Festival to find out what the film was about.

Then there was the cow.

Lynch, so enamored of Dern's performance, hired out a cow and plopped himself down on a L.A. street corner to try and garner Academy consideration for her performance. Sitting alongside a placard that read "Without cheese there wouldn't be an Inland Empire," Lynch's explanation was that "Cheese is made from milk."

How all these dots connect, of course, is for Lynch to know and for the rest of us to muse over. Lynch shot each scene of the film supposedly without knowing where he was going with the project. As he told www.Rottentomatoes.com:

"I didn't know anything. I got an idea for a scene with Laura Dern, and I shot it, and that was it. But I couldn't stop thinking about this thing and it held the promise of more… I got five or seven unrelated scenes when it happened that… oh my golly… this thing is coming out that unifies these things. A story [was] emerging that holds them."

In an NPR interview about her performance, Laura Dern recalled the stricken look on the face of one of the film’s producers when Lynch, on location in Poland where much of the film was shot, requested a one-legged woman, a monkey and a lumberjack by 3:15 p.m. to be ready for filming 45 minutes later. According to Lynch, who received a lifetime achievement award at the Venice Film Festival where the film premiered in addition to the National Film Critics’ Award for best Experimental film in this country, the shoot took place over two and a half years entirely without a defined script. The resulting almost entirely plotless concatenation of surreal imagery and raw psychological snippets has divided critical opinion with many calling it a fitfully brilliant masterpiece and some emerging feeling only a deep damage to the comforting concepts of time. Dern's portrayal of an increasingly fragmented young actress has been called by most who’ve seen the film her best ever. Eastern European sexual slavery, collaborations with Pole Circus Zalewski, and a cameo by Naomi Watts as a talking rabbit-headed person are but a few of the disjunctive, hallucinatory scenes Lynch has woven together to create a truly awe-inspiring interrogation of the collective unconscious.

To top it off, the film was shot completely with a Sony digital video camera that Lynch felt allowed him to reach new height of expression. From the riveting trailer released online, it's tricky to tell what impact this has actually had on his epic, but that's probably because of the flickering nightmarish cuts of Dern screaming, the haunting soundtrack, or the scenes of pantomime bunnies going through the motions of being a normal human family.

Equally praised and trashed by critics high and low, this three-hour stroll through Lynch's vaguely tethered id may be too much for some. Considering how the film was pieced together, the idea of Dern portraying an actress in a movie that's having trouble getting made might be sort of telling (along the lines of Fellini's 8½).

But the hardcore Lynch fans (you know who you are) will have little choice. They will have to answer the clarion call of the little man in Twin Peaks who clapped his hands and said, "Let's rock."

JoE Silva and Brandon Waddell

Inland Empire opens at Ciné on Friday, Apr. 6. See Movie Times for screening schedule.