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DAVID LYNCH: NEO-GOTHIC SLEEPWALKER
David Lynch lets the Nicolas Cage tiger loose in this sexy, hot, and seriously effed up Neo-Gothic romantic crime thriller.
"This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top."
Laura Dern's Lula tells her worldview as if it were a theme line written in stone.
Romantic fire burns hot between Nicolas Cage's Sailor and Lula as they run from and toward people who want Sailor dead.
Lula's mother, Marietta Fortune (Diane Ladd), is a real piece of work.
Harry Dean Stanton, Isabella Rossellini, Willem Dafoe, Crispin Glover, and Jack Nance all give inspired performances in an ensemble piece like none other.
Rock 'n' Roll baby.
Pure surges of cinematic energy pours through "Wild At Heart," just as the title promises. Bad omens.
"Wild At Heart" is a remarkable film by any standard. What fun.
Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does. This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel. Punk heart still beating.
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French novelist and screenwriter Roger Vailland (October 16, 1907 – May 12, 1965) wrote the source material for what would be Joseph Losey's next to last film.
That Roger Vailland was an independent leftest comes through this film's angular perspective on the capitalist objectives of the film's predatory characters.
Isabelle Huppert's character, Frédérique grew up in rural France working on her family's trout farm, where she witnessed her father and his friend taking advantage of young women.
Outraged by the behavior of the men around her, Frédérique sets out on a mission of sexless capitalist revenge against the horny sex. Being asexual comes as an asset.
Now married to Galuchat (Jacques Spiesser), a closeted gay man, Frédérique picks the victims of her particular method of emotional blackmail to flirt with, and thus con, rich men who follow her like lemmings to the sea.
While "La Truite" seems on its surface to be a shallow character study of a judgemental young woman playing power games on an international chess board, the movie gets at unwritten agreements between men and women.
Frédérique's narcissism and greed may provide her with money, but love will not be on offer.
A lack of direct communication between the sexes allows for grey areas open to exploitation. The promise of sex can always be reduced to its opposite because only desire can create such an atmosphere. Everything else is just eggs being squeezed from a fish.
Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does. This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.
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In 1986 David Lynch broke the language of cinema wide open in the same way that Jackson Pollock did with the art world in the early '40s.
Using a minimalist filmic palate for a neo-noir set in small town America, Lynch blends surrealist elements into a suspenseful story of adult sexual awakening (vis a vis BDSM) juxtaposed against violence, mystery, and mental illness.
Using iconographic character names drawn from '50s Americana iconography (see Frank, Sandy and Ben), and a moody musical score to match, Lynch presents returning hometown boy Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan).
After his father suffers a heart attack while watering the family lawn, Jeffrey unearths a severed ear in a field that he crossed thousands of times in his youth. Unspeakable acts are being carried even in America's most seemingly provincial towns. Every city has its "bad side of town."
Our curious protagonist finds a willing ally for his impromptu private investigation into the mystery of the ear's owner in the local police detective's romantically inclined daughter Sandy (Laura Dern). On the surface, Sandy seems like natural girlfriend material for Jeffrey, but this guy has a taste for the exotic (if incestuous) that vanilla Sandy can't fulfill.
However, Jeffrey is unprepared for the psychological and emotional upheaval that will devour him when he stalks the fetishized life of Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), a sultry nightclub singer used to playing rough with a very debauched criminal named Frank (Dennis Hopper). The bi-polar Dorothy has a nasty little taste for kink.
"Blue Velvet" is David Lynch's greatest cinematic achievement next to "Eraserhead." His balance of symbols, and artful use of montage, is at its most poetic and powerful. His metaphoric allusions about the dysfunctional nature of the ideal "American Dream" family incite hellish visions of the abusive father (as embodied in Hopper's character) and the traumatized wife/mother who needs saving from her idealized son.
Every role is perfectly cast. Dennis Hopper's portrayal of a whacked-out crime boss is terrifying. Lynch's haunting small-town mystery carries an indescribable undertow that kicks like a spastic mule in heat.
"Blue Velvet" is the closest that any filmmaker other than Buñuel has ever come to such a daring cinematic feat.You can bet that Quentin Tarantino took notes from "Blue Velvet" in creating "Reservoir Dogs." Here is a film that alters everyone who sees it.
