David Lynch's latest tour de force

"Mulholland Drive," the ultraweird director's horror-show look at Hollywood, has a malevolent movie industry, debauched actresses and lots and lots of steamy lesbian sex.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Oct. 12, 2001 | "Mulholland Drive" is the most womanly of David Lynch's movies. To call it feminine wouldn't be the same thing: That implies a shy delicacy, almost an air of propriety, that "Mulholland Drive" just doesn't have. Instead it's wily and sophisticated, stylized like an art deco nude, and suffused with so much feline glamour and beauty and naked eroticism that its chief aim seems not to be to dazzle us with its typically Lynchian plot twists, but to seduce us into its sway and keep us there. This is a movie with hips.

"Mulholland Drive" is beautifully and intricately structured: Those who delight in disassembling Lynch's puzzles will have a great time flipping the plot around, tracing its breadcrumb clues back from the end to the beginning. But it also works out perfectly if you're interested only in the interplay between its hypnotically beguiling characters (or even if you're interested only in seeing them go to bed with one another). At the very least, the luxe air of menace that hangs around "Mulholland Drive" like a vapor is evidence of Lynch at his best. If you could put the essence of 3 a.m. in a perfume bottle, it would smell like "Mulholland Drive" looks.

With its liquid pacing -- ever seen drops of mercury spilt from a broken thermometer in slow, shiny, heavy droplets? -- and codeine-glorious imagery, "Mulholland Drive" has magic powers that put your head into a very weird place. The intoxication begins and ends with the two lead characters, a noir-fantasy Betty and Veronica who meet by chance and team up to solve a mystery. Blond, bright-eyed Betty (Naomi Watts) has just arrived in Hollywood from a small town, ready for stardom in her slim, practical but spangle-trimmed cardigan sweater. Her aunt has granted her the use of her comfortable, tastefully retro-appointed apartment, in an old-Hollywood style complex overseen by spunky senior-citizen starlet Coco (Ann Miller, the '40s musicals star), who has an aura of old Hollywood about her. She favors Chinese brocade ensembles and wears her jet-black hair drawn back snugly, the better to show off her jazzy spit curls.

Betty unlocks the door to the borrowed flat, eager to familiarize herself with all its secrets and delights; in the bathroom, she finds a beautiful naked girl (Laura Elena Harring) in the shower. At first the woman, a raven-haired stunner (she's got Snow White's coloring and Jayne Mansfield's body), can't remember her own name. In a panic, she catches sight of a framed poster for "Gilda" and announces spontaneously that her name is Rita.

Betty and Rita are uneasy friends at first, but it's not long before their differences -- Betty the small-town innocent; Rita the slow-burning temptress -- begin to interlace and reinforce one another. Together, they must find out who Rita really is: The clues they start out with are a blue key and a handbag stuffed with cash; their search leads them to a dingy apartment court and a nightclub suffused with neon-blue light. The people who penetrate their orbit, either significantly or tangentially, include a cocky hipster film director (Justin Theroux); the spokesperson for a shadowy mobster who's out to control Hollywood (Dan Hedaya); and a malevolent cowboy who looks as if he were lifted straight out of a '30s radio serial (Monty Montgomery) -- his belted sepia-tone jacket, trimly tied kerchief and mountainous white hat speak out so loud and clear you can almost hear them.

There's also a midget in a wheelchair (Michael Anderson -- it wouldn't be a Lynch movie without him), a singing sensation in frosted lipstick and a bouffant skirt who's poised to be a major movie star, and a creepy, shamanistic homeless man who rules a discarded-shopping-cart kingdom in the back of a cheerfully run-down Sunset Strip coffee shop. That's Lynch for you. Some characters are woven firmly into the plot and others dangle, but even the red herrings contribute something, adding patches of shading to the picture's overall mood.

Next page: For a moment, Lynch's Hollywood is the sexiest place in the world