Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20891 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-09-09
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.77:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 148 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Pandora couldn't resist opening the forbidden box containing all the delusions of mankind, and let's just say in Mulholland Drive David Lynch indulges a similar impulse. Employing a familiar film noir atmosphere to unravel, as he coyly puts it, "a love story in the city of dreams", Lynch establishes a foreboding but playful narrative in the film's first half before subsuming all of Los Angeles and its corrupt ambitions into his voyeuristic universe of desire. Identities exchange, amnesia proliferates and nightmare visions are induced, but not before we've become enthralled by the film's two main characters: the dazed and sullen femme fatale, Rita (Laura Elena Harring), and the pert blonde just-arrived from Ontario (played exquisitely by Naomi Watts) who decides to help Rita regain her memory. Triggered by a rapturous Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison's "Crying", Lynch's best film since Blue Velvet splits glowingly into two equally compelling parts. --Fionn Meade

DVD Description
DVD Special Features:

Theatrical Trailer
Cast and Crew Biographies
Cast and Crew Interviews (including David Lynch)

Synopsis
David Lynch strikes again with this literal nightmare of a motion picture--a brilliant, scathing, hysterical, and haunting ode to Hollywood. In the film, a mysterious dark-haired woman (Laura Elena Harring) emerges from an accident with a purse full of cash and a head full of amnesia. Meanwhile, Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), a wide-eyed gal from Deep River, Ontario, has just landed in Los Angeles with dreams of movie stardom. When Betty finds the nameless beauty in her aunt's apartment, she is deeply intrigued by the situation and offers to help her. This sends the two women on a bizarre search for the truth through the macabre, sun-soaked streets of the City of Angels, where the mob, a young film director (Justin Theroux), a studio executive with a tiny head, and an enigmatic figure named the Cowboy all float into the picture, then out again, until there is no longer any distinction between what is dream and what is reality.
Originally filmed as a pilot for ABC, Lynch's daring, open-ended vision was coldly rejected by the network. As he was about to abandon the project, French producer Pierre Edelman convinced Lynch to rethink it as a feature. The result is this stunning expression of the subconscious, a testament to the power of personal artistic vision.

Customer Reviews

Phenomenal
Seldom has a film gripped me and made me think so long after having viewed it .Visceral and simply stunning in every way. Naomi Watts is outstanding in this undoubted work of genius. All hail David Lynch!

Driven to madness
Right from the first scene the viewer is seduced into another world.
A would-be actress arrives in Hollywood. She is talented, charismatic, beautiful and seems set to take the film industry by storm. Or is she? We are presented with two stories, two slants to a life.
How does David Lynch do it? He constructs a parallel universe where everything takes on a surreal, nightmarish quality. Anticipating the bizarre keeps us constantly on the edge of our seats. "Eraserhead" was too grotesque and "Blue Velvet" too sickening; but "Mulholland Drive" is different. Stil the odd, brooding atmosphere pervades, as does the underlying eroticism, the underlying terror. But this film satisfies.
David Lynch - what a man to meet - or perhaps run screaming away from.

Drive down
Los Angeles is not known for being a spooky town, with the palm trees, sunshine and Hollywood. But David Lynch makes it so in "Mulholland Drive," a brilliantly elliptical film where nothing is as it seems. With outstanding acting, eerie direction and a thoroughly strange plotline, this is a brain-bender of the best kind.

The movie opens with heavy breathing, visions of a lovely young girl being awarded, many teen couples dancing, and a slow descent toward a pillow. Then we cut to a three-way car crash, followed by a pretty young woman (Laura Harring) wandering down the hill to an upscale apartment. But she soon encounters the owner's niece, pretty plucky Betty (Naomi Watts). When Betty learns that the mysterious young lady -- who is calling herself Rita -- has amnesia, she decides to help her find out what is going on.

Elsewhere, a promising young film director's life is falling to pieces, because of a pair of malevolent brothers who want a particular young lady to star in his film. And when Betty begins to explore the strange car accident that Rita walked away from, they find that there is a bizarre conspiracy brewing in L.A. Or is there? The path gets more and more twisted, as the boundaries of reality and dreams blur.... and it all centers on a mysterious name: Diane Selwyn.

This is a movie that doesn't make sense on the first viewing -- at first it just seems to be a straightforward suspense movie. But David Lynch completely turns that on its ear. Not everything makes sense in this film -- such as the monstrous man behind the restaurant -- but the pieces start to slowly click together as we find out who Diane Selwyn is.

When you realize what the first two hours actually are, the film makes much more sense -- a muddied look at Diane Selwyn's life, but fragmented and twisted by her desires. Multiple alter-egos, wishful thinking, obsessive lesbian love, jealousy, rage, and random people and places come into her dream, but reflected as she wants to see them, and tainted by her own guilt.

And even the sunny opening scenes, with the starry-eyed Betty arriving in sunny L.A. for an audition, take on a dark tinge when you discover who Diane was, and that she had the same experience. Naomi Watts plays both Betty and Diane, one sweet and innocent, the other bitter and unbalanced. And she's marvelous as both, whether playing a sweet young girl, or a hardened, obsessive starlet. Harding does almost as good a job as Rita, especially as the film starts, but the focus slowly and inexorable shifts to Watts.

David Lynch ignores the shiny warmth of L.A., focusing on back-alley monsters, creepy dreams and hit men. He's known for being incredibly weird, and here he doesn't disappoint -- ordinary words and occurances are sinister, and the camerawork is insanely good. The camera slowly descends, wanders down hallways, and creeps to reveal something horrible. A few scenes -- the lesbian love scene, the monstrous restaurant creature that is implied to be in the middle of it -- seem a bit out of place, but then again, their presence could be interpreted in multiple ways.

Surrealistic noir is the best way to describe "Mulholland Drive," an exceptionally strange mind-bender of a movie. Creepy, beautiful and very very unreal, and not something forgotten easily.