Justifiably revered as a modern classic, David Lynch’s dark dream of Hollywood is a noir-inflected and surrealist descent into the American unconscious; a damaged puzzle that slips unsolved between the mirage of identity and the poisoned fairy tales of success.
Starring a career-best performance by Naomi Watts as wide-eyed actress Betty and the alluring mystery of Laura Harring’s performance as Rita, Mulholland Drive is also a troubling reflection on the art of performance – and what is lost and found in its fictions.
In cinematic séance with the spirit of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), Luis Bunuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), with the influence of The Wizard of Oz (1939) never far behind, Lynch truly understood how deeply we can lose ourselves in film:
“It’ll be just like in the movies. Pretending to be somebody else…”
