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The Observer Review 6 January 2002 There’s Posh

SCREEN
Can Footballers’
Wives save ITV?,
page 8

Lynch’s
law and
disorder
Pimps, assassins, derelicts and
hitmen – welcome to the noir
Hollywood of David Lynch
in notoriety to the Hellfire Club. The

FILM OF drive is named for William Mulholland,

the ruthless Irish-born engineer who

THE WEEK
Philip French
Mulholland Drive (146 mins, 15) Directed by
David Lynch;starring Naomi Watts,Laura Elena
Harring,Ann Miller
DAVID Lynch’s compelling Mulholland
Drive is that Hollywood-on-Hollywood
movie lurking within every director, but
its origins were inauspicious. It began
three years ago when ABC-TV eagerly
commissioned an open-ended, free-flow-
ing television series along the lines of
Twin Peaks, hated the pilot and shelved
the project. A while later, the French
company Canal Plus offered $2 million
additional financing if Lynch would
turn it into a cinematic movie and pro-
vide a satisfactory ending.
The title inevitably evokes Billy
Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, also in the
noir mode but far less sinister. Sunset
Boulevard stretches across Los Angeles
from the Pacific to the old downtown
area, passing through Bel Air and Bev-
erly Hills as well as brasher commercial
districts. The altogether darker Mulhol-
land Drive zigzags along the crest of the
Santa Monica Mountains that divide
North and South Hollywood. If you
study Ken Schessler’s perennial best-
seller This Is Hollywood, you get the
impression that Mulholland is redolent
with evil, haunted by the sad and bad
spirits of the stars and starlets who have
been murdered, committed suicide or
participated in orgies this past century.
Mulholland Drive Mansions, Errol
Flynn’s old place, has a reputation equal
participated in the conspiracy to rob
whole inland communities of their
water that inspired Chinatown. The dam
on nearby Lake Hollywood is named
after him and alongside that is the vast
Hollywood sign, from which the 24-year-
old British actress Peg Entwistle hanged
herself in 1932 when a studio declined to
offer her a contract.
This, then, is the brooding setting of
a picture that is as nightmarish and
blackly comic as anything Lynch has
made. It takes place over what appears
to be 48 hours and centres on two
women, an experienced brunette (Laura
Elena Harring) and an ingenuous
blonde (Naomi Watts), as in Blue Velvet.
The brunette narrowly escapes death at
the hands of hitmen taking her for a ride
on Mulholland Drive; the blonde arrives
hopefully from Canada to seek an acting
career in what she calls ‘the dream-
place’. They meet in an apartment near
Mulholland belonging to the ingénue’s
absent aunt where the brunette has
sought refuge when suffering amnesia
after the accident in which her would-be
killers perished. Time and identity frac-
ture; people seem and, in some cases, are
interchangeable. Thus, the flat looks
unaltered since the Thirties or Forties,
and the amnesiac brunette decides to
call herself Rita after seeing a framed
poster for Gilda on the wall. Eagerly, the
blonde sets out doing auditions and vol-
unteers to help Rita find her true self,
using evidence from her handbag.
The women’s investigative quest
takes them to an apartment block where
they discover a decomposing body, to a
bizarre Hispanic nightclub called Silen-
cio where everyone mimes to tapes, and
into an erotic lesbian affair. Meanwhile,
Rita (Laura Elena around them swirls a corrupt world of
Harring) exchanges blackmailers, pimps, assassins, agents,
a kiss with Camilla directors, disfigured derelicts and hang-
(Melissa George). ers-on, who keep crossing each other’s
paths. A director is forced to give a lead-
ing role to an actress chosen
by the Mob. In a brilliantly
The sinuous sustained sequence, an inept
hitman kills his brother, the
camera leads brother’s secretary and a jan-
itor at a seedy office block.
around menacing The sinuous camera con-
stantly leads around menac-
corners, and ing corners, and drags us
down into lakes of satanic
drags us down darkness. Death beckons as
into lakes of an end and an escape, and
while everything is sharp,
satanic darkness. super-real, we know that this
is a phantasmagoria. We’re
Death beckons experiencing the horrors and
excitements of somebody’s
as an end and dream, possibly a collective
nightmare based on personal
an escape anxieties and the gurgling
mulch of a community’s knowledge of
itself. PHILIP FRENCH’S TOP FIVE FILMS ON
Curiously, the film that Mulholland CURRENT RELEASE
Drive most readily brings to mind is the
Coens’ surreal Barton Fink, another 1. Mulholland Drive (15) middle-class New Delhi is
story packed with echoes of scrofulous
Tinseltown folklore and rumour in David Lynch’s surreal Day performed by a flawless
of the Locust-style take on ensemble
which an innocent in Hollywood
becomes involved with someone who the ugly underside of 4. Lord of the Rings (PG)
may be a projection of his anxieties and
ends up disillusioned, suicidal, alone.
Hollywood New Zealand director
The Coens remained tight-lipped and 2. The Day I Became a Peter Jackson lovingly
Lynch is giving nothing away. His own Woman (U) Outstanding creates Tolkien’s Middle
synopsis reads in toto: ‘Part One: she three-part Iranian movie Earth down under
found herself inside the perfect mystery;
Part Two: a sad illusion; Part three:
on the struggles of women 5. The Hired Hand (12)
from childhood to old age Peter Fonda’s gritty
love.’
How do you judge performances in in a patriarchal society Western about cowboys in
this context? The two central women –
Watts and Harring – bring a certain vul-
3. Monsoon Wedding (15) the 1880s, badly
nerable charm to their roles. Some – the Mira Nair’s funny, moving
study of the conflict
distributed in 1971 and
long unavailable, emerges
82-year-old Ann Miller, for instance –
rely on their familiar faces. Others, between tradition and in this restored print as a
keeping a straight face, go with the
Lynchian flow.
rapid social change in classic of the genre

Gung ho,gung ho,it’s off to war we go When Kurosawa

Pro-military movies are back. And the plots are as preposterous as ever came to Dunsinane
dello’s As You Desire Me, a piece about

OTHER FILMS illusion and the re-creation of identity

Philip French
Behind Enemy Lines (105 mins, 12)
Directed by John Moore; starring Owen
Wilson, Gene Hackman
The Last Castle (131 mins, 15) Directed by
Rod Lurie; starring Robert Redford, James
Gandolfini, Delroy Lindo
Va Savoir (156 mins, PG) Directed by
Jacques Rivette; starring Jeanne Balibar,
Sergio Castellito
Nobody Someday (15, 99 mins) Directed by
Brian Hill; starring Robbie Williams
PRO-MILITARY movies have been
making a steady comeback in Holly-
wood since the cycle of anti-war
movies that followed America’s with-
drawal from Saigon. The new year
promises a barrage of them, starting
with Behind Enemy Lines and The
Last Castle, preposterously plotted
pictures about dedicated senior offi-
cers defying their superiors.
Behind Enemy Lines stars the tall,
tousle-haired Owen Wilson who looks
the way Robert Redford would do had
he taken a couple of straight lefts to
the nose from Mike Tyson. Wilson
plays Lieutenant Burnett, a cocky
naval flyer, and the plot (vaguely
based on a true story) turns on his
transformation from cynical gung ha!
to patriotic gung ho! He starts out
determined to quit the navy and ends
up signing on for life after being pur-
sued for several days in the snow-
bound Balkans by genocidal Serbs.
Burnett has been shot down over
forbidden territory and has photo-
graphic evidence that could bring
enemy leaders into the dock at the
Hague. The agent of his conversion is
long-serving Admiral Reigart (Gene
Hackman), who’s so determined to
bring Burnett home that he defies his
Gene Hackman in Behind Enemy Lines.
Nato superior (a surly French officer),
exploits media interest (Sky TV, this
being a Murdoch production) and
even leaves his carrier to lead the res-
cue operation, before he’s relieved of
his command and retires. There are
incidental excitements as Burnett
dodges his pursuers, but it’s a ridicu-
lous film with a high body count of
foes and minimal American losses.
Hackman’s counterpart in The Last
Castle is three-star General Irwin
(Robert Redford), gallant hero of Nam,
the Gulf and Bosnia, who arrives in a
stark military jail dripping with
medals like a Christmas tree. The
author of The Burden of Command,
Irwin has pleaded guilty to disobeying
orders in some incident in Burundi
and been sentenced to 10 years by a
reluctant High Command. Immedi-
ately, Irwin shows his contempt for
the prison commandant, Colonel Win-
ter (James Gandolfini), whose eyes are
as untrustworthily porcine as Irwin’s
are sincerely pellucid. Winter is a cor-
rupt sadist who has never heard a shot
fired in anger, and gradually Irwin
restores the depressed convicts’ mili-
Robert Redford in The Last Castle.
tary pride. He turns them into a cohe-
sive force that in a climactic storm of
rain and flag-waving triumphalism
takes over the jail. In the process, he
becomes a Christ-like figure along the
lines of Paul Newman’s convict Cool
Hand Luke. Amazingly, the director of
this portentous movie is a graduate of
the US Military Academy at West
Point, though the chief influence
would appear to be his subsequent
years as a movie critic.
Jacques Rivette is one of the origi-
nal Cahiers du Cinéma critics who
constituted the French New Wave and
is to be respected for sticking to his
last for more than 40 years. However,
his long, ludic, self-indulgent movies,
mostly about well-heeled folk
involved in the arts, have divided the
relatively few people who’ve seen
them as they’ve appeared spasmodi-
cally since his impressive, somewhat
irritating debut with Paris Nous
Appartient in 1960. That first film cen-
tres on a group of Parisians staging
Shakespeare’s Pericles, and his latest –
Va Savoir – turns on a production of
another rarely performed play, Piran-
best known today through the 1932
Garbo movie which reverses the end-
ing.
The film’s wilful heroine, Camille
(Jeanne Balibar), returns to Paris
after three years in Rome in an Italian
production by her actor-manager hus-
band. Immediately, she renews her
relationship with her former lover, a
philosopher specialising in Heidegger,
and the pair become involved with a
dancer, and a sister and brother, the
former an ex-jewel thief, the latter a
practising one. The result is like a for-
mation dance performed at the speed
of a chess game. There’s lots of vapid,
high-flown dialogue about love and
art conducted by cool, confident
French narcissists, and some clever
patterning in the plot with two major
discoveries made in different
kitchens. The moral is summed up in
the Italian actor’s search for a lost
Goldoni play, Il Destino Veneziano,
which he eventually finds under the
real title Il Festivo Veneziano. The
film’s title, Va Savoir, roughly ‘Who
knows?’, derives from the final line of
a Rimbaud poem.
Nobody Someday is an unexciting
documentary of a 15-city European
tour by Robbie Williams, the biggest,
though not the most interesting, thing
to come out of Stoke-on-Trent since
Arnold Bennett and Stanley
Matthews. The black-and-white con-
cert footage is interspersed by back-
stage interviews with membersof the
travelling crew of 65 and the obses-
sively self-critical Williams, who
began the journey hating touring but
comes to love it.
Robbie Williams has a striking
resemblance to Hugh Laurie and
would make a splendidly gormless
Willie Mossop in Hobson’s Choice. The
chief highlight comes when a
deranged continental fan pushes him
off the stage.
REISSUE OF
THE WEEK
Philip French
Throne of Blood (110 mins, PG) Directed by
Akira Kurosawa; starring Toshiro Mifune,
Isuzu Yamada
AKIRA KUROSAWA, who died three
years ago at 88, is having his prodigious
50-year career celebrated these next two
months by a complete retrospective at
the National Film Theatre. He was a
great humanist and moralist whose
work was both peculiar to Japan and
universal. Whether set in the past or
present, his films make us look again at
society and history and, above all, to
look into ourselves. Rashomon won the
Golden Lion at Venice in 1951 and was
the first Japanese picture to be shown
widely abroad. The title entered the lan-
guage as a term for the uncertainty of
facts, the impossibility of arriving at
absolute truth. But to those taught dur-
ing the Second World War that the
Japanese were subhuman, undifferen-
tiated monsters, Rashomon and the
films that followed constituted an
unforgettably transformative experi-
ence. I recall seeing it in
1952 at the seedy Futur-
ist Cinema in Lime
Street, Liverpool, where
The interior
it was being exploited scenes are sharp,
as an erotic Oriental
movie about rape. It precise, hypnotic.
affected me as no film
has before or since, and The exteriors
I emerged with my
ideas about Japan, its
of galloping
people and culture com-
pletely changed.
horses have an
The Fifties and Six- exhilarating
ties were Kurosawa’s
greatest decades and dynamism
Throne of Blood: Macbeth, Noh style.
the movie with the most screenings in
the season (more than 30) is Throne of
Blood (1957), first of his three Shake-
speare adaptations, the others being
The Bad Sleep Well, a social melodrama
transposing Hamlet to corporate Japan
(1960) and Ran (1985), his King Lear.
Following Macbeth closely and made in
the heightened Noh style, Throne of
Blood stars his most frequent collabo-
rator, the commanding Toshiro Mifune,
as General Washizu, a warrior in a rain-
drenched, windswept, fog-shrouded
medieval Japan.
The interior scenes are sharp, pre-
cise, hypnotic. The exteriors, of horses
galloping through the forest, or of cav-
alry men charging up hills of volcanic
ash to Cobweb Castle, the film’s Dun-
sinane, have an exhilarating
dynamism. The images
are unforgettable – the
meeting with the
witch, a wraithlike fig-
ure spinning in the for-
est, for instance, or the
death of Washizu in a
storm of arrows that
turns him into a
human pincushion.
The death of Boromir
in Peter Jackson’s The
Lord of the Rings is the
latest homage to the
death of Kurosawa’s
Macbeth.