Mulholland Drive

„Itʼll be just like in the movies. Pretending to be somebody else.“ - Betty on Mulholland Drive

Originally a failed pilot for Lynch's television project of the same name, the French producers' intervention finally resulted in the filmmaker's most complete work to date. Aspiring actress Betty (Naomi Watts) arrives in Hollywood. Her story, teetering on the edge of excited anticipation and fear of failure, is unexpectedly intertwined with a classic Hollywood film cliché; Betty's loneliness is shattered by an unknown femme fatale suffering from memory loss (the until-then non-actress Laura Harring). Together, they work to restore the mysterious beauty's memory, and in the process Lynch masterfully fills in each clue they find with a new question, questioning the motivations of both the title characters and the mysterious strangers and comic figures the heroines encounter in their amateurish quest. 

David Lynch wins on two opposing fronts in Mulholland Drive. He builds on his earlier unbridled works, Eraserhead and Lost Highway, with an associative dreamlike narrative logic, but also presents a precise psychological study of Betty, relatively autonomous from the rest of the plot. Alongside the fantastic cinematography of Lynch's frequent (underrated) collaborator Peter Deming and the performances of all the cast (including the episodic characters), one of the best films of the last two decades is particularly notable for Jack Fisk's hyper-realistic and meticulously detailed production design.

The film warm-up to the exhibition David Lynch: Up in Flames. DOX Center for Contemporary Art.