UN-REVIEW: INLAND EMPIRE

I've been trying to fathom how to write a meaningful review of David Lynch's new film for over the last week since I saw it but I just don't know how. I could explain that it begins with Laura Dern playing an once popular actress whose career has settled into a rut. She secures the lead role in a movie that she hopes will rejuvenate her career but it comes to light that the movie is a remake of Polish film that was never completed because the lead actors were murdered.

That synopsis covers about the first 45 minutes of Lynch's film... except that I forgot to mention the sitcom with the rabbits who talk in stilted non-sequiturs but whose words are greeted with hysterical canned laughter. Oh, and the crying woman watching said bunny sitcom on a TV in a hotel room. But apart from that the first 45 minutes of INLAND EMPIRE kinda' makes sense.

And then after that Laura Dern goes on some kind of nightmarish journey where the real world, the fictional world of the film she is making, the Polish film upon which it is based and the true story of that film's making collide, merge, blur, overlap and loop back on themselves.

But I was expecting that so before I went into the cinema I resolved to not attempt to make sense of the narrative as it went along and simply allow INLAND EMPIRE to happen at me. And I loved it, all three hours of it. INLAND EMPIRE is a natural successor to Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive in its multiple layers of reality and fiction and Lynch's immense skill in wringing every ounce of tension and terror from the dark spaces in familiar, ordinary environments. The film is shot entirely on digital video and some critics have complained that this results in an cheap, amateurish look. Personally, I found the look of the film wonderfully disorienting. No, it doesn't have the look of traditional film stock, it is something different, something that is visually striking in its own right. The sound design, as always in Lynch's films, is tremendously atmospheric and greatly contributes to the sense of unease that pervades the film.

In conclusion I can conclude nothing. One viewing simply isn't enough to take it all in and start to process the information. As with all Lynch's films, there is no definitive interpretation of what it is and I suspect that it will take many subsequent viewings on DVD before I will even begin to formulate an opinion on what it's all about. As I watched it, I felt some subliminal intuition that INLAND EMPIRE does make some kind of sense, that it is actually about something on not just a load of random weirdness that Lynch has thrown at the screen for a laugh.

Laura Dern gives a wonderful and varied performance that is by turns timid, awkward, angry, bitter, heartbroken, compassionate, distraught and disturbed.

Many people would find this film utterly infuriating, maybe even those who have enjoyed some of Lynch's work in the past. It is therefore a difficult film to recommend. All I can say is that I am so grateful that, despite the dearth of imagination and rabid pursuit of commercial success that dominates contemporary culture, people like David Lynch are still sometimes able to get their mad ideas out there into the world. At a time when I feel that dogmatic rules dictate mundane formulas for what films and books and music and art should be, I needed something as wilfully barmy and disobedient as INLAND EMPIRE to come along.

Thank you, David.