Inland Empire

Colour, 35 mm
USA, Poland, France, 2006, 172 min
Section: Horizons

Synopsis

Hollywood actress Nikki Grace receives an offer to play the main role of the unhappy Sue Blue in a new film by director Kingsley Stewart. The actress is not deterred even by the discovery that the film is a remake of a Polish film called 47 that was never completed because the main characters succumbed to forbidden amorous feelings and were murdered with a rusty screwdriver. When Nikki allows herself to be seduced by acting partner Devon Berk, her hitherto transparent world is transformed. The lovers call each other by their characters’ names and the boundaries between different various realities definitively come tumbling down. Reality, dreams, vision, film, as well as the pasts, futures, and identities of the protagonists set the stage in which the characters move freely in a story that director David Lynch described as focusing on women in a quandary. What place is there though for the rabbits from his television sitcom? This star-studded charade, in which Lynch returns to his surrealist beginnings from the days of Eraserhead (1977) was several years in the making, with no set screenplay, and was shot using Sony PD-150 digital cameras.

About the director

David Lynch (1946, Missoula) debuted with the surrealistic Eraserhead (1977) and gained wider public attention with the spectacularly composed post-modernist films Blue Velvet (1986) and Wild at Heart (1990 – Palme d’Or at the Cannes IFF). He entered the public consciousness thanks to his watershed television serial Twin Peaks (1990–91), which he initiated, directed in several episodes, and even changed into a feature-length film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). In the films Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006) he showed an interest in the theme of split personalities as integral parts of the “schizophrenia” of post-modern reality. The purely uncomplicated The Straight Story (1999) however demonstrated that Lynch never allows himself be tied down by the expectations of audiences.