"I'm scared like I can't tell you. Of all people, you're standing right over there, by that counter. You're in both dreams and you're scared. I get even more frightened when I see how afraid you are and then I realize what it is. There's a man... in back of this place. He's the one who's doing it. I can see him through the wall. I can see his face. I hope that I never see that face, ever, outside of a dream."
It is fitting that the film takes place in Los Angeles, often called the City of Dreams. Sometimes these dreams blossom, but more often than not they crash and burn into a sea of yesterday, nostalgia, and the forgotten. Here Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), a young woman who has recently flown into Los Angeles to stay at her aunt's home for a film audition, is introduced to us. We know nothing of Betty's past, only of the dreams she has for her future. She is a typical aspiring actress; wide-eyed, beautiful, and with a smile that won't go away until reality hits (or in this case, disintegrates).
When she arrives at her aunt's vacant home, she is surprised to find a woman living there. Rita (Laura Harring) is an amnesiac, a woman who has been in a car accident and can not remember anything other than 'Mulholland Drive'. It is time for me to step back and stop analyzing this film for a moment and speak completely from my heart. When these girls, Watts and Harring, are on-screen together, they create sparks. There is an eroticism and a simultaneous sense of innocence shared mutually between them, and it feels real when I watch them share scenes. As both of the characters slowly fall in love with the other, and are scared not only because of this unfamiliar feeling, but because of their surroundings as well, Watts and Harring both show unbelievable depth for actresses as inexperienced as they were at the time when the film came out.
If this review would suggest to this point that MULHOLLAND DRIVE is a straight-forward romance, or a straight-forward anything really, let me say clearly that it is not. It is one of the most twisted, complex, horrifying, and beautiful works of this decade's cinema. David Lynch loses himself in the multiple stories, and as the film progresses it gets increasingly twisted, and every minute is better and more mesmerizing than the last. While the wide-eyed dreams of Hollywood are shown through the eyes of Betty, the hard truth is shown through the eyes of Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux). Kesher is a director, whose film falls into the hands of the wrong business associates. Although his story is told in a surreal, detached way that I can not explain in words, it feels oddly realistic, because business deals happen under the table and behind closed doors in Hollywood every day, and their entire existence can seem to have vanished the next.
As I said earlier, as the film progresses it becomes more and more twisted. Because Lynch dares to free himself from all types of traditional narrative flow and storytelling styles, MULHOLLAND DRIVE soars. It is a credit to the actors that they do not become overwhelmed and their characters completely up-ended by the storyline at the film's end, although by the time the curtain falls no one is as they were before. The deeper down the rabbit hole MULHOLLAND DRIVE digs, the better it gets, until a transcending, awe-inspiring finale.
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