At first, the three-hour film’s structure seems awkwardly baroque, with flashbacks within flashbacks and fantasies within those (the changing hairstyles provide some guide to what’s happening when); the jumping around is triggered sometimes by Proustian details and sometimes by crude plot necessity. But as the narrative keeps circling from the day at the beach to the “present-day” lunch between the two estranged friends (I kept wondering whether they’d finish the chat in time for the pianist to make it to her concert that evening), it becomes clear that the real mystery under investigation is not what happened on the beach, or the fate of the pianist’s former flame, but the process of memory itself, and how a master filmmaker can re-create that process on the screen.
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Six years ago, Armando Iannucci's slick and merciless political satire might have drawn more blood, but even now it blows away the recent satiric competition with its sharp, sardonic screenplay and uncompromising cynicism.
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By the time it got to the anthropomorphic bunnies acting out a sit-com to a laugh track (or are they donkeys? subscribe to www.davidlynch.com to learn more), I knew that Inland Empire was David Lynch at his most seductive and a film I’d be thinking about for a lot more than the rest of the afternoon. Watch the trailer for Inland Empire (YouTube) Say ‘cheese’: Milking Laura Dern’s performance. By Peter Keough
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