Inland Empire (A Woman in Trouble)

I'm not overly impressed with Inland Empire. Granted, I was not exactly in my best mental and physical state when I watched it (have been losing sleep over the last few months). Besides, I hate movies shot with HD camera, which's lifeless and doesn't register light very well (or maybe too well). Guess Lynch's inclination to HD has a lot to do with budget. He's not a box-office wonderboy in the eyes of the studio suits, and he has his share of the "clash of the titans" with them. In Mulholland Dr and Inland Empire, his profound distrust of the Hollywood system is evident. HD gives him a lot more autonomy for sure.

Going back to the movie itself. I'm ambivalent about it, a somewhat love-hate entanglement. The first hour is sheer brilliance, loaded with tons of typical Lynchian motifs and build-ups: mystical dialogues (how I love that demonic neighbour of Grace, her thick European accent and the "old tales" she recounted), jumbled timelines, multiple identities assumed by each character, convulsive emotional outbursts, parallel stories, retro set design, the return of crazy close-up shots from Lost Highway, so on and so forth. But the problem is, unlike Lost Highway or Mulholland Dr., they never pay off. It's as if these Lynchian devices buckled under the weight of their own eccentricities. Lynch tries to mesh his short films (e.g.the rabbit family) and half-baked ideas (e.g. a cursed unfinished film) into one package. It works to the extent that his signature style is all over the place, but it fails miserably to integrate everything organically. The film is almost plotless, or simply too fragmented for anyone to make any sense at all. It's like Dr Frankenstein's little experiment went horribly wrong: a mish-mesh of rabbit head, human limbs and donkey torso stubbornly remained inanimated after repeated jolts of electricity. It's a bit frustrating. One can call it an experience, surrealistic for sure, but is this merely an attemp to dress up its shortcomings? The film tries too hard to obfuscate and confuse. As much as I still enjoy the style, I'm disappointed that after a five-year hiatus, Lynch simply decided to pull out all his tricks and served them in one plate instead of coming up with something fresh. The subheading of the film should be changed to "A Director in Trouble" (for Lynch to employ a subheading is quite the telling clue to the state of the film). Lynch probably has little idea about what he's doing. Nevertheless, given his cult status, a sneeze from him is good enough to send his fans churning out film readings and creating myths to the proportion of the Lords of the Ring. I'm a fan, too, but I was sorely underwhelmed. Maybe I'm just a nitpicky curmudgeon.