Anniversary of Mulholland Dr.
On May 16, 2001, David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" premiered at the Cannes International Film Festival.
David Lynch came up with the idea to make a television series called Mulholland Drive during the filming of the television series Twin Peaks in 1990. According to actress Sherilyn Fenn, Lynch was going to do a so-called "spin-off," an offshoot in which Fenn's "Twin Peaks" recurring character Audrey Horne tries to break into Hollywood. In other words, one of the most important themes of the television series Lynch conceived was the struggle of actors trying to break into Hollywood. The series' planned title suggests this, as the real-life Mulholland Drive cuts across Los Angeles, forming the border between the poorer San Fernando Valley to the north and Hollywood to the south. As such, it serves as a metaphor for the boundary between failure and success in the movie business. Some film critics sometimes even refer to "Mulholland Drive" as a "poisonous letter to Hollywood."
The first, pilot, episode of the series conceived by Lynch was filmed in 1999 and ... remained only a pilot episode. The ABC television company, which allocated $ 8 million for the filming of the series, was dissatisfied with the result and closed the project. One of the reasons for the TV company's dissatisfaction was the age of the leading actors Naomi Watts (31) and Laura Herring (35), who, according to the management of the TV company, were too old to become TV stars.
Upon learning of the termination of the project, the French film company Studio Canal offered Lynch an additional $7 million on condition that the filmed episode be turned into a full-fledged feature film. Lynch initially rejected the offer, hoping that another broadcaster would show interest in continuing to film the television series. But when he learned that the ABC television company had destroyed the film's sets and sold off all the costumes and props, he had no choice but to accept the offer of the French film company. Subsequently, Lynch called the actions of ABC a blessing in disguise, which gave him new ideas on how to continue filming, which ultimately led to a more than successful result.
At the aforementioned Cannes International Film Festival "Mulholland Drive" was nominated for the main prize - the Palme d'Or. The jury of the film festival, chaired by the great Scandinavian actress Liv Ullmann, considered the Italian melodrama "La stanza del figlio (The Son's Room)" directed by Nanni Moretti to be the most worthy of the main festival prize. The company of "relative losers" to David Lynch's film was, among others, Joel Coen's "The Man Who Wasn't There" and "Moulin Rouge!" by Baz Luhrmann. But David Lynch, like Joel Coen, was awarded the Best Director award.
At the beginning of the following year, 2002, "Mulholland Drive" received four nominations for the American Golden Globe Award, but did not win a single one. In the most important of the received nominations - Best Motion Picture - Drama - the Hollywood Foreign Press Association awarded the victory to Ron Howard's "A Beautiful Mind". A little later, "Mulholland Drive" received one nomination for an Oscar, but it was a nomination in one of the most important categories - Best Director. And in this nomination, David Lynch lost to Ron Howard, the director of the film "A Beautiful Mind".
At European film forums, Lynch's film "Mulholland Drive" showed better results. The French Film Academy gave him their César Award for Best Foreign Film (although almost half of the film's production cost came from French money), and the Danish National Film Critics Association honored him with their Bodil Award for Best American Film of the Year.
Among American professional film critics, Lynch's picture caused extremely contradictory, if not opposite, reviews. For example, the famous American film critic James Berardinelli rated the film with only two stars out of 4 possible and wrote in his review:
""Mulholland Drive started life as a pilot for a TV series. When ABC rejected it outright, Lynch elected to shoot a series of new, lurid scenes to provide an ending of sorts. Watching the final project, it's easy to determine where this "break" occurs. The first 105 minutes of this movie are engrossing, and, for the most part, intelligible. There's no content that would be deemed unsuitable for television. Then, just as things go off the deep end, slipping into the realm of the incoherent, the two lead female characters remove their clothing and spend most of the final 40 minutes topless. As a TV series, Mulholland Drive might have been compelling stuff; as a movie, in large part because of Lynch's excuse for an "ending", it's a mess....I suppose on some level I still want to recommend Mulholland Drive - it's a wonderfully stylish film, the score is incomparable, and the first two-thirds border on brilliant. But I despise with a white-hot passion what Lynch did with the ending. I was simmering with fury when I came out of the screening..""
American film critic guru Roger Ebert gave Lynch's film 4 stars out of 4 possible and tried to explain what Berardinelli did not understand:
"There have been countless dream sequences in the movies, almost all of them conceived with Freudian literalism to show the characters having nightmares about the plot. "Mulholland Drive" is all dream. There is nothing that is intended to be a waking moment. Like real dreams, it does not explain, does not complete its sequences, lingers over what it finds fascinating, dismisses unpromising plotlines. If you want an explanation for the last half hour of the film, think of it as the dreamer rising slowly to consciousness, as threads from the dream fight for space with recent memories from real life, and with fragments of other dreams--old ones and those still in development."
Russian film critics mostly devoted to David Lynch's film "Mulholland Drive" very laudatory reviews. Personally, I was closest to the assessment of Alex Exler, who in his review noted:
“I liked Mulholland Drive. Very much so. This is a smart, subtle and very difficult to perceive film. A real intellectual movie. If you don't understand anything in it, don't get upset and don't consider yourself an idiot. You just need to give yourself the trouble to think a little, reflect, analyze and compare some pieces of the film with each other. For what? Yes, just so that the brains do not stagnate. It is clear that it is much easier to watch hundred-million-dollar idiocies based on comics, or modern stupid comedies, the creators of which compete with each other, who will make the most stupid and flat as a board script, because there is no need to strain, but so the head can completely forget how to think. Do you need it?""
For ordinary moviegoers, David Lynch's film "Mulholland Drive", for all its complexity, received fairly high marks. 67% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users rated the film from 8 to 10. 22% of users gave the film the highest scores - "tens". Taking into account this indicator and the above, David Lynch's film "Mulholland Drive" rating according to FilmGourmand version was 8.3, thanks to which it took 416th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
