Certification. 18
Running Time. 2 hours 14 mins
Director. David Lynch
Cast. Patricia Arquette, Robert Blake, Balthazar Getty, Robert Loggia, Bill Pullman.
Rating. 64%
Back in February 1997, Roger Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote this wonderful review of Lost Highway,
"David Lynch's "Lost Highway" is like kissing a mirror: You like what you see, but it's not much fun, and kind of cold. It's a shaggy ghost story, an exercise in style, a film made with a certain breezy contempt for audiences. I've seen it twice, hoping to make sense of it. There is no sense to be made of it. To try is to miss the point. What you see is all you get."
Fred (Bill Pullman), a jazz saxophonist, has a suspicion that his wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette) is having an affair. When the couple starts to receive anonymous videotapes delivered to their doorstep each morning, the storyline turns darker and even more sinister. The content of these mysterious videotapes becomes increasingly disturbing each day. But at the height of the drama director, David Lynch folds the story in on itself to focus our attention on young car mechanic Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) who is soon to be involved with two girls, his girlfriend Shelia (Natasha Gregson Wagner) and Alice (Patricia Arquette), the mistress of a local gangster (Robert Loggia).
Not that it is widely considered a horror film, but to my mind Lost Highway is one of the most unsettling horror films of the 20th century. From the outset, Lost Highway presents itself as a stylish neo-noir psychological thriller, a sense of unease and menace are soaked into every scene. Wildly unpredictable and genuinely disturbing, fear is created from a fear of the unknown. Where a traditional horror film can startle an audience with a routine jump scare, Lost Highway doesn't bother to scare you, instead, it terrifies you.
Patricia Arquette must be close to delivering a career-best performance in the dual roles of Renee and Alice, displaying an incredible range from cold, demure disdain to overt, voracious sexuality. At one point, Arquette is forced to undress at gunpoint and stand naked in a room full of strange men - an obvious echo of Dorothy Vallens' (Isabella Rossellini) humiliation in Blue Velvet.
The mid-point identity-shift transformation follows an atmospheric, rather than plot-driven, line of logic and challenges our expectations of identity and reality. The mid-point transformation is a mechanism David Lynch employs again following Lost Highway; the technique is further refined in Mulholland Drive. The director leads the audience on a journey with a seemingly linear plot, through a sequence of ominous events. Initially, the storyline appears clear, until suddenly Lynch introduces a change of perspective that completely transforms the situation, the events, and even the characters.
Critics were cautious when Lost Highway was released, many uneasy with the complex structure. Nonetheless, the film may just be the director's purest exercise of style. Without Lost Highway, it would have been infinitely more difficult to make contemporary psychological cinema. The likes of Fight Club, The Machinist and Shutter Island owe a debt of gratitude to Lost Highway, and the avant-garde filmmaking of David Lynch.
My take on the meaning of the film is that Lost Highway tells the story of a schizophrenic man who loses contact with reality, kills his wife and then, from prison, escapes in an unconscious projection of his life. But ultimately, your enjoyment of Lost Highway is determined by whether you can align the two stories, or whether that even matters.
Comments
Post a Comment