INLAND EMPIRE
Directed by David Lynch
by Vera Brozzoni
“A woman in trouble.” That’s the only synopsis director David Lynch agrees to provide for his last film. Wow, a nice thriller to give me goosebumps.
I’ll lean on my paramour’s shoulder and he’ll hold me tight in a soothing embrace and then… well, most likely your man is just as scared as you and can’t wait to skid outside and see the light of day again.
 Or, maybe he wants to skid out because the film is boring him to death and he’s not at all in a romantic mood. Or, you are both bored to death, in which case you’d better leave the cinema and go and have some fun.
Because this is David Lynch: either you love him, or you hate him. INLAND EMPIRE (the director insists it has to be written in caps lock) is the most abstract and haunting of his films, more than three hours of a nightmare that unravels between Los Angeles and Poland, starring marvellous Laura Dern as an actress who goes across different layers of reality and fiction until these layers cannot be told from one another.
At the beginning, Nikki Grace is cast to be the lead actress in a romantic drama called On High In Blue Tomorrows by a director played by Jeremy Irons (by the way, Irons is like good wine: he improves with age), but the director reveals that the film is doomed – it had been in production a few years earlier, but at an early stage the two lead actors were found murdered.
Nikki is shocked by the news but keeps cool until a bizarre neighbour pays her a visit, and casts a menacing prophecy on her… from that moment, Nikki’s identity melts, she enters a TV sit-com played by rabbits, she gets killed on the Walk of Fame, gets chased by some mysterious man in Poland, shoots a man dead and more.
Surrounded by various female figures who step in, read a few lines and then are gone, Nikki swims through the film but her trip gets more and more hallucinated; the thread that links all the layers of the action is a story of betrayal, jealousy and murder. But this story itself frays into a nightmarish series of unfortunate events the audience can’t help but be taken adrift by.
Or, the audience may well refuse Lynch’s whole game and decide that abstract cinema is not their cup of tea. Despite being a hardcore Lynch fan, I myself understand how the director can sound like an arty-farty cheat: my advice is, give it a try without prejudice and you’ll discover a new way of experiencing cinema.
After all, all abstract painters and even the Impressionists have been dismissed and accused of killing real art; perhaps there will be a day when INLAND EMPIRE will (righteously) be seen as Les Demoiselles D’Avignon for film history.
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