David Lynch's Inland Empire (2006) has received a preliminary release date: April 19.
Andrew O'Hehir
Quote:
How do we explain the unlikely cultural status of David Lynch? There is no hotter ticket at this year's New York Film Festival than the North American premiere of Lynch's new picture, "Inland Empire." I know two movie buffs in their early 20s who are planning to hang around outside Alice Tully Hall on Sunday night and buy tickets from scalpers (if they can find them), and they certainly won't be alone.
What will they see if they get in? An obsessive and surreal three-hour picture, almost totally lacking in conventional plot, shot on high-definition video by a 60-year-old director. You could say, I suppose, that "Inland Empire" is about an actress (played by Lynch favorite Laura Dern) in a Hollywood film that's been cursed by Gypsies. But that's like saying "Ulysses" is a story about a guy who sells newspaper ads, or, more to the point, that the dream you had where you flew over the Atlantic Ocean with your second-grade teacher and Marilyn Manson was about air travel.
Lynch's movies have always flirted with (or, to his detractors, wallowed in) dreamlike levels of abstraction and ambiguity, associative and reiterative images drawn from the unconscious, and other tropes that have more to do with experimental cinema and avant-garde art than with narrative drama. Would someone out there like to tell me what the plot of "Eraserhead" is, or to explain why understanding it is important to one's appreciation of the film, or lack thereof? By the time of "Blue Velvet" (released 20 years ago!), it seemed clear that conventional narrative, along with the audience expectation it builds, was an element that Lynch would sometimes use, sometimes subvert and sometimes ignore altogether.
Many of Lynch's fans apparently believe, however, that the director has set out for them a massive jigsaw puzzle that has a solution. Salon's famous "explainer" about Lynch's 2001 "Mulholland Drive" remains one of the most-clicked articles in our history; it's a brilliant but bizarrely pedantic piece, full of confident assertions that the film has a unitary narrative that mostly makes sense and mostly hangs together. I would argue that A) that's not true, and B) even more important, it's missing the point.
Lynch's movies are about his super-saturated colors and meticulous sound design; his characters' terrifying glimpses of the spectral, the demonic and the divine; his sense that movies render time into a porous and malleable medium; his troubled and troubling examinations of female sexuality as an image-commodity, and other things we could discuss. Are they also about their putative narrative plotlines? Sure, in the same way that Duchamp's "Large Glass" is about a bride and some bachelors, or "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" is about a dinner party.
I'm not going to review "Inland Empire" in any comprehensive way, not least because I'm not quite sure what to say. It has not yet been acquired for U.S. distribution (which ought to tell you something about it right there) and it seems unfair to review a film that probably won't be seen by American audiences until sometime next year. (It will be released in various European countries between November and March.)
If anyone wants to explain this one in terms of its plot, though, good luck to you. The inland empire of the title refers, in my judgment, not to the suburban hills and valleys southeast of Los Angeles but to the darker regions of the self. Nikki, the fading star played by Dern, must venture into her own inland empire -- and so, I think, does Lynch. Many of his trademark haunting, grotesque and comic images are captured here, in the smudgy, caffeine-edged luster of HD video (it's obvious why Lynch is attracted to the medium, but I miss the brilliance of his pictures on celluloid).
Minimal bones are thrown to the audience. Nikki has signed on to make an adulterous love story -- it looks like a terrible film, and I can't tell whether that's intentional -- with a bad-boy costar Devon (Justin Theroux), directed by a pompous Englishman named Kingsley (Jeremy Irons). None of these people sticks around for long, although Harry Dean Stanton almost steals the movie in his tiny role as Kingsley's debauched and broke assistant. The picture belongs entirely to Dern and to the director, as Nikki seems to walk through a mysterious portal out of her own privileged life and into that of her character, and then (perhaps) into yet another existence as a battered Hollywood streetwalker.
There's also the question of the Gypsy curse and the film's haunted prehistory, some fragments of a sinister thriller set in Poland (and spoken in Polish), an absurdist drawing-room comedy involving a family of giant rabbits wearing clothes (my colleague Stephanie Zacharek says they are not rabbits but donkeys, and who am I to insist on a single interpretation?) and lots and lots of ominous images of Dern/Nikki/whoever wandering through dark places: alleys, corridors, staircases, the streets of Lodz, Poland, and the corner of Hollywood and Vine. That's without mentioning the chorus of Hollywood hookers doing the Locomotion, or the dynamite musical number that unfolds behind the closing credits and has nothing to do with the rest of the movie.
To the extent that "Inland Empire" does offer a narrative, it's largely a downer, a story about a woman who is symbolically, and perhaps actually, debased. Don't expect to go home energized by Lynch's take on the movies, art and life here. Despite its moments of inspired terror and mystery, this isn't a cult hit in the making like "Mulholland Drive," or even a contrarian critic's delight like "Lost Highway." It's an opaque and baffling work, difficult to follow and difficult to like.
That said, this may be a necessary work for Lynch, if not exactly for his audience. "Inland Empire" does not mark a new direction. Reportedly written and shot on the fly, with neither director nor actors knowing exactly what would come next, it's a distillation of, and meditation upon, the themes that have possessed Lynch since at least "Blue Velvet" and seemed to come to climax, pun intended, with "Mulholland Drive." But Lynch's questions and obsessions are always big ones; there's nothing insincere or inauthentic about him. Good or bad, his films imitate no one else's, and serve as a constant rebuke to the parasitical industry that loves him but can't quite handle him.
Pro-B
Last edited by Deciazulado; 03-21-2023 at 11:35 AM.
That's an unexpected but welcome surprise. I hope Optimum / Studio Canal will do it justice.
In retrospect, Mulholland Dr. has remained my favourite Lynch film, but Inland Empire is never less than fascinating and should hopefully look better on Blu-ray than it did on DVD. The soundtrack should also be something to hear in lossless form.
Oh wow, that's a nice surprise. And we were hoping Mulholland would be out around then, but still no Studio Canal announcement re that yet, right?
This was shot on digital video right? but (forgive me for not knowing about this stuff) was the original digital film recorded in HD? If it wasn't, could it really look better than on DVD?
That's an unexpected but welcome surprise. I hope Optimum / Studio Canal will do it justice.
In retrospect, Mulholland Dr. has remained my favourite Lynch film, but Inland Empire is never less than fascinating and should hopefully look better on Blu-ray than it did on DVD. The soundtrack should also be something to hear in lossless form.
I still have not watched this film (I have the LE DVD) but don't the visuals change often (i.e. some shots/sequences are intentionally "better looking" than others)? I'm just curious to know if it will be an atypical 1080p video transfer.
I still have not watched this film (I have the LE DVD) but don't the visuals change often (i.e. some shots/sequences are intentionally "better looking" than others)? I'm just curious to know if it will be an atypical 1080p video transfer.
It's been so long, I can't remember to be honest. I have actually only seen it in the cinema, never on DVD (though I do have it). The whole thing was a bit sort of 'grimy' with that sort of digital, hand-held camera aesthetic present in, say, Public Enemies (though grimier than that). Obviously a BD can increase resolution and be HD whilst keeping that sort of gritty look, I'm just not sure if the master is of a type that would be benefitted by the upgrade, if it was originally shot on HD. Shot on digital HD or physical film = able to be upgraded, but if shot digitally on SD, I don't know... I'm pretty sure the whole film was shot in the same way, not sure about some bits being intentionally 'worse' than other... but then I'm not a massive videophile so am not entirely sure!
It's been so long, I can't remember to be honest. I have actually only seen it in the cinema, never on DVD (though I do have it).
lol, same here. I double checked IMDB and they say it was SD video (which was my understanding) but it certainly was transferred to 35mm. I don't know if the dvd came straight from the digital source or was taken from a 35mm print. The film obviously wont be eye candy but I'm curious to how it'll turn out. Hopefully it has lossless audio which should be worth the upgrade...
So, wouldn't the improvements on this be fairly marginal with a Blu-ray release? Just asking.
I'd rather have his other movies released on Blu, but that's just me (basically I'm still too frightened to watch this again ).
preordered without hesitation. even if the blu-ray improvement is only marginal, I'd imagine it will make for much better viewing on my 100" screen than the DVD.
There's an area of Southern California that has been called the Inland Empire because of its location away from the beaches for many decades. I was just wondering if that is the area where this movie is set. Does anybody know?
There's an area of Southern California that has been called the Inland Empire because of its location away from the beaches for many decades. I was just wondering if that is the area where this movie is set. Does anybody know?
I don't think the name could mean anything else, but it was shot in LA and is largely set in Hollwood, is Inland Empire, like, near/at those places?
Exactly. I just want a presentation of the movie that I can blow up on my projection screen without further degradation of the image quality. A blu-ray release would allow me to do that and Inland Empire can use all the help it can get in looking good on a big screen.
Even though the movie looks "raw" and "gritty" it should look amazingly raw and gritty. And that's what a Blu-ray can offer.
Yes, but examples of raw and gritty BDs (like Fight Club, or something) have a source you can turn into HD but keep the directors intentions when it comes to the aesthetic... but you still have the higher resolution etc present, and a noticeable improvement over DVD. If the source is not a higher resolution then I don't think there could be an improvement, but we shall see...
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