Inland Empire

I'm a big fan of David Lynch - having watched Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive several times over. I bought a copy of Eraserhead only a couple of weeks ago to remind myself where he had come from - and could see several continuities with later works. Not the least of which is a strongly biographical element in his stories - which of course like many other writers and directors he denies. But last night I couldn't make it through to the end of his latest, Inland Empire. Crikey! No wonder distributors were reluctant with this one. I admire him for using the latest technology of video cameras and keep the control of editing, sound, direction, and production in his own hands. But three hours!

I wouldn't mind if he's come up with either more novelties, humour, or light and shade. But I think we get the basic premise of the story quite quickly [blurring distinctions between life and film as art] - and after that it's just one tease after another. Is this Laura Dern as actress or her fictional persona? It's the sort of sleight of hand which only needs to be done once - or maybe twice if you can give it a new twist. But several times! I think not.

Moreover, the emotional mood and intensity is the same in both modes. I got quite fed up of Laura Dern doing drop-jawed anguish in camera close up, scene after scene.

There were also lots of repetitions from his earlier films. His interiors and lighting are great - but I think we've seen the lounge-with-lampshades and the fizzle-pop light bulb expiry moments enough now. The same for the Shoo-Wap-a-Dop singing girl groups, the character transformations, the mysterioso night club scene, and the slightly batty older woman who portends closely to the camera.

I might give it another go at some future date - but I will certainly have to have a lot of time on my hands. I'm willing to give up time to something long - but it also has to be well shaped - and long for a purpose. Maybe the ninety-minute norm of most cinema releases isn't such a bad constraint after all David?

Hidden - film review

Hidden is not a film for those who desire non stop dramatic action; it has a deliberately slow pace, though one to which the viewer soon adapts. Nor does it use the usual techniques of a cinema thriller - yet it is a thriller and includes one horrific episode which shocks to the core. Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil) is a successful, if somewhat smug television personality who presents a popular book programme. He mixes with authors and publishers and lives in middle class comfort with his son and wife Anne (Juliette Binoche). Suddenly he receives a videotape of his own house taken from the outside followed by posted drawings - a series of unsettling images of a child’s face smeared blood red. He tries to find out what they might signify but his efforts fail.

He reports the events to the police but they cannot assist until a crime has been committed. As he seeks to follow up the clues which he sees in the videos - suggesting these unwanted items are related to events in his childhood - more things are delivered: videos, drawings, postcards as well as weird phone calls to his wife.

Both husband and wife begin to feel the pressure of this malign observation and family life suffers accordingly. Eventually, following his clues, he goes to see someone whom he suspects is the source of the campaign: Majid, the son of an Algerian worker who once worked on his father's farm but now lives in a scruffy flat in a run down part of the city.

Majid is modest, mild and friendly; he denies any connection with the videos and other articles sent, but Georges is accusing and angry. Soon afterwards, with no evidence of how it could have been made, a video of this meeting itself is also sent to Georges as well as a copy to his television producer. The tension in the film begins to mount until that transfixing moment of horror - which has stunned cinema audiences - presages some kind of resolution to the narrative. However, many loose ends are left untied and at the end, the film offers no firm conclusion.

Some analyses of Hidden have compared it to Coppola's The Conversation, a commentary on a society which has become subject to multifarious surveillance via CCTV, satellite, bugs and so forth; but it is more subtly layered than this. Its pervasive theme of deep-rooted societal and institutional racism against North African immigrants perhaps makes it more like Paul Haggis's Crash, that penetrating dissection of Californian racism.

It is also about the insecurities and shameful secrets which often lie beneath the veneer of success. Georges seems to have everything to which any aspiring person might aspire - success, family, status, mand oney. But reaching back into the past we see that it has been acquired at the expense of others. A reckoning of sorts finds its way to him in a fashion which disrupts his comfortable life and truly humbles him.

Amongst the superb ensemble acting, Auteuil gives a wonderfully sensitive performance as the character forced ultimately to suffer on the rack of his childhood cruelties. This is a film which disturbs and stays in one's thoughts for long after the credits (allegedly containing clues to the those untied loose ends) have rolled down. This is a film not to miss.

© Bill Jones 2007

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Michael Haneke, Hidden (Caché) 2005

 

 

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