CINEMA: Charl Blignaut
MOST people are going to hate the new David Lynch movie. And I’m not just talking about Mr and Mrs Greater Suburbia either – they realised this sicko soap opera was going nowhere and gave up on Lynch somewhere in the middle of the second series of Twin Peaks. Point is, even the kids who thought Wild at Heart was, like, the coolest movie ever made, are probably going to hate the new Lynch movie.
Despite his Eighties cult status, Lynch’s first feature since 1990, The Lost Highway, is almost deliberately anti-trendy. And a damn good thing that is too. You have to go out of fashion if you are to enter the annals of the great, difficult film-makers. The closest comparison to a 1997 Lynch is not a Quentin Tarantino. It’s a Luis Bu — uel, the deceptive surrealist.
The Lost Highway is not fun for the whole family. It’s not even, like, a cool road movie. Sure, all the usual stuff’s there – the audacious lighting and music; the dreams of fire and the ominous dwarf; the sense that you are not yourself, that Bob’s lurking …
But The Lost Highway is more disjointed, the soundtrack carries a very, very nasty threat; the sense of inevitability is more pronounced. It’s less glib and less commercial. Actually, it’s a mean, grungy motherfucker that refuses to explain itself or clarify the almost entropic equation that flings its characters into a nightmare of time, space and bad German porn.
In telling the tale of how saxophonist Fred Madison enters the underground to restore his alignment with the gods, almost nothing happens. But nothing happens with such devastation that you are aware, by the end, that you have just witnessed an extraordinary tale set in a parallel universe horribly close to home. Slaptrip.
The Lost Highway opens on art circuit this Friday, May 30