Inland Empire
Inland Empire is the latest film by director David Lynch (Mullholand Dr., Blue Velvet). The film follows aspiring actress Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) who lands a role in a new movie, 'On high in blue tomorrows', being directed by Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons), but she begins to fall for her co-star Billy Devon (Justin Theroux). The actors quickly discover that the film is believed to be based on a gypsy folk-story and cursed.
While this sounds like an interesting plot, this movie is impossible to follow in any conventional way. I was not surprised to discover that Lynch had no script while shooting this film and would hand actors lines by the day that he had written the night before. It seems to be a mish-mash of about four separate plots (often involving the same actors playing different characters). We have the making of 'On high in blue tomorrows', a lot of sequences set in what looks like Eastern Europe that follow a group of Polish prostitutes and some other strange characters, an animal trainer who is caught up in a bizarre travelling circus, and some exceedingly strange and pretentious scenes involving people wearing rabbit masks who spout meaningless dialogue in monotone.
I knew to expect a completely disjointed, chaotic and extremely surreal experimental film, but I was still disappointed by this film, especially as Lynch's decision to film using digital cameras made it visually unappealing. The high point of the film were the quite engaging early scenes of the film, especially where it seemed that the film was going to look into the boundaries between Nikki's reality and the film she is making breaking down, before you realise there isn't actually any real narrative structure or continuity.
At just under three hours long, I was desperate to get out by the end of this disorientating and frustrating film by the end. I would recommend this movie only to people interested in extremely experimental films that challenge the conventions of narrative and are deliberately meaningless.
One Star
Tom Hodgson
