In a context of uncertainty and fluctuation as to the opening of cinemas, the series “A posteriori le cinema” is an opportunity to celebrate the 7and art by revisiting key titles.
It was 25 years ago. Before being presented at the Sundance Film Festival, the highly anticipated new film by David Lynch, Lost Highway (lost road), had its premiere in Paris in January 1997. If there were positive reviews, most shunned the proposal, considered incoherent. The filmmaker’s previous film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (Twin Peaks. Fire walk with me), having been a flop, some were pleased to believe it broke down. Since then, Lost Highway has been rehabilitated and is described as a turning point in Lynch’s work.
The project was born from Lynch’s desire to experiment with the codes and figures of film noir, from his desire to collaborate again with Barry Gifford, the author of the novel that inspired his Wild at Heart (Sailor and Lula, 1990), and his fascination with the hyper-mediatized trial of OJ Simpson, accused and then cleared of the murder of his spouse.
In an interview conducted as a supplement to the DVD of Lost Highway, the filmmaker explains, cryptically, but poetically: “Film noir is a beautiful feeling for [évoquer] trouble in the realm of unknown night. I like it because it allows spectators to dream […] All movies are about some part of the human condition. This is why it is important to anchor the story in something real, while leaving space for the dream. »
We first meet Renee (Patricia Arquette) and Fred (Bill Pullman), a jazz saxophonist, in their chic bunker-like house in the hills of Los Angeles. One day, a video cassette is left on their doorstep. You can see their house there.
On a second videotape, we see the couple sleeping. A third, which Fred watches alone, hints that he murdered Renee.
At this point, however, reality has long since “slipped”. Is this all just a dream, or rather a nightmare, going on in Fred’s head?
duplication
Thus Renee reappears under the first name of Alice (Patricia Arquette, bis). She is no longer brown, but blonde: a recurring motif in Lynch inherited from Vertigo, by Hitchcock (see Sheryl Lee in Twin Peaks and Naomi Watts and Laura Harring in Mulholland Drive). As for Fred, he is imprisoned to then be released under the features and the identity of a certain Pete (Balthazar Getty), a mechanic who will begin an affair with Alice. And there is Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia), the gangster of whom Alice is the mistress, and who is also a producer of porn films under the name of Dick Laurent.
In short, in Lost Highway, people split, not to mention the enigmatic ” Mystery Man (Robert Blake), who is ubiquitous in a chilling scene.
In this identity and narrative maelstrom, however, it is Fred Pete’s perspective that is privileged, which allows the audience to have a grip on the story – as much as possible with Lynch. Certainly, the point of view of Fred Pete is not reliable, but it is assumed: “I like to remember things in my own way. How I remember them, not necessarily how they happened,” Fred tells cops in a key scene.
Despite this, at the time, accusations of complacency abounded. In Entertainment Weekly, Owen Gleiberman writes: “Lynch wants us to find resonance in the mysterious sequence of stories: one dream metamorphosing into another. But the metamorphosis is more like an awkward collision. »
In the Chicago Grandstand, Roger Ebert compares the experience to “kissing a mirror”: “You like what you see, but it’s not very fun and a bit cold […] There is no meaning to be found. Trying is missing out. What you see is all you will get. »
To this, it will be objected that there is in this case much to “see”, and consequently to “obtain”.
Especially since from the beginning of his career, with Eraserhead, Lynch asserted a pronounced taste for unreal atmospheres and experimentation. After his disenchantment with the order Dunes (1984), blue-velvet (1986) brought him back for good to those lands where the imagination runs wild. Already established, therefore, his openly dreamlike approach to narration invited a reading that was anything but Cartesian.
Rehabilitation
In fact, this bias was eventually acknowledged, and celebrated, in Lynch’s next film, Mullholland Drive, dubbed upon its release in 2001. An enthusiasm that initially continued to condemn Lost Highway to the siding.
In an analysis published in First in 2020, the critic Frédéric Foubert recalls: “This indelible retinal shock from the 1997 vintage nevertheless suffered, a few years later, from the comparison with Mulholland Drive, which pushed its stylistic innovations (story cut in two, monstrous rereading of Hollywood film noir, etc.) to a supreme degree of perfection, making its predecessor appear in retrospect as a simple draft of the masterpiece to come. Today, however, it stands out as a sum, the only Lynch to combine the two sides of its author’s inspiration: the glamour poisonous on one side (the vein blue-velvet Mulholland Drive), the postindustrial brutality of the other (the axis Eraserhead Inland Empire). »
Author and director of programming for the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York, Dennis Lim crafts a similar defense as early as 2008 in an essay published by Slate. “ Lost Highway occupies an increasingly central place in the evolution of David Lynch. This malevolent neo-noir was a return to first principles—never since its mind-blowing debut, Eraserhead, a Lynch movie hadn’t been so completely stuck in someone’s head — but it was also a sign of movies to come. »
Placing the atypical and aptly named The Straight Story (A simple story, 1999) in a class of its own, Lim draws parallels between Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. “All three, which could be said to constitute a psychotic trilogy, are non-linear puzzle films in which the otherworldly atmosphere and the rifts in spacetime are a direct consequence of mental trauma. of the protagonist. »
In the interview mentioned above, David Lynch concluded: “The word ‘hypnotic’ is the right one, because you enter a state of openness, ready to receive whatever comes, like in a dream or a world of the unknown. It’s a wonderful thing to be trained like this. »
The film Lost Highway is not available in digital format, but is available on DVD and Blu-ray. On the menu for the next few weeks and months: Cabaret and The Godfather(The Godfather).