Nov 12, 2009 10:30 AM
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Mulholland Drive(MD) is a piece of cinematic brilliance that should be watched by anyone who not only sees and enjoys movies but analyses them minutely down to the atoms. Now this might sound a little bit alarming for the usual movie buff but nevertheless this movie should be in ones ‘sure to watch’ list.
MD is typically David Lynch with the neo noir and surrealist touches with stream of consciousness technique of narration. This movie is not linear but runs in the way the mind of a protagonist thinks and thus is a part of realistic cinema.
If I alternately name this movie it might be called, ‘Destroyed in Love’. It tells the story of Diane Selwyn, a struggling actress in Hollywood and her relationship with a starlet called Camilla Rhodes. I shall describe my interpretation of the movie. The movie is entirely about a dream that Diane has. This dream is not shown to the audience as a dream but it begins as the real movie itself. So audience will be tricked to think they are watching the core plot of the movie when they are just watching the thinking and the dream of the protagonist. Why does the protagonist have this dream is revealed at the end of the movie.
The movie plot unfolds like a psychological thriller with an abrupt car crash on Mulholland Drive. There is a survivor who escapes into the city through sunset boulevard and inside a home which is being locked up by someone who is leaving for a trip. This character is played by Laura Harring who also plays the character of Camilla Rhodes in the movie. This character suffers from amnesia and calls herself Rita. She is afraid since the men in the car wanted to kill her just before she had the crash. Enter Betty(Naomi Watts), an aspiring actress who is shown to have brilliance and huge potential. The home where Rita is hiding belongs to Betty’s aunt. Betty is shown to have a pleasant and kind character who tries her best to help Rita find her true identity. However all that Rita remembers is the name Diane Selwyn. The two women track Diane and come to her home to find her rotting in bed. The upset Rita is consoled by Betty and the two women are drawn to each other which culminate in one of the best love scenes I have seen. Later that night Rita wakes up speaking Spanish and the two women go to an opera to hear a woman singing of lost love and both weep. The phrase that everything’s recorded and nothing really is playing though we can hear it prepares the audience to think that all that they have seen might be unreal and a dream. This is confirmed when the women come home and Betty disappears. During the course of all this there are also side characters, motifs and symbols portrayed with vivid details as we generally see in dreams but hardly remember.
The narrative rolls in to the present when we see the character seen in the dream rotting on a bed. The character is not shown to be rotting physically but mentally. This is Diane Selwyn in reality played by Naomi Watts who was Betty in the dream. The reason of Diane’s misery is revealed and that is her love relationship with Camilla(Laura Harring) who was Rita in the dream. Camilla betrayed Diane to get engaged to a director called Adam and is also shown kissing another woman. She refuses Diane and her heart wrenches in agony. Diane contacts a killer who ultimately kills Camilla and all this is shown to audience through symbols which kind of says that the dream continues. Unable to take the pangs of conscience and the emptiness of a broken relation and betrayal, Diane shoots herself. Thus the movie comes a full circle from the accident at Mulholland drive to the suicide in the end.
The justification of the dream which shows Betty taking care of the shaken Rita can be the reflection of Diane’s insecurity, failure, and pain where she sees an ideal world where she is an actress with huge potential unlike in real life and she is taking care of her love, Rita. Thus Betty becomes an alter ego of Diane and Rita is the person which Diane wanted Camilla to be.
Naomi Watts is painfully brilliant in the portrayal of the sweet Betty and the vulnerable and broken Diane. It’s a performance worth an Oscar. The chemistry between the two women is also amazing and in the first love scene they appear to be so much passionately in love. It hardly matters that they are women; it could have been a guy and a girl. David Lynch’s ‘Twin Peaks’ and movie like ‘Lost Highway’ will be remembered while watching MD. It’s disturbingly beautiful and brilliant portrayal of a tormented mind of a lover. There are times when the pain of the protagonist hits you and even more if you have been in love and have been betrayed and humiliated publicly. As an audience you will be made to suffer effortlessly with the protagonist without any melodrama in dialogues or scenes. Emoting through eyes is wonderfully portrayed here by Naomi. A movie about the workings of the subconscious mind is difficult to make and the disturbance created is like reading a Virginia Woolf novel or a tribute to Sigmund Freud. The name of the movie is a road because it’s a sort of a journey which ultimately goes wrong somewhere.
