The hottest ticket at the New York Film Festival this year is David Lynch’s new film — 3 hours long and shot on HD Video. No distribution deal as of yet — but when it does get one, I’m there, because I’m a Lynch fanboy.
“Inland Empire” is about an actress (played by Lynch favorite Laura Dern) in a Hollywood film that’s been cursed by Gypsies.
Sort of. It’s a Lynch film — the plot, such as there is, is sort of secondary to the experience.
Nikki (Laura Dern) has signed on to make an adulterous love story with a bad-boy costar Devon (Justin Theroux), directed by a pompous Englishman named Kingsley (Jeremy Irons). None of these people sticks around for long, though, as Nikki apparently walks through a mysterious portal out of her own privileged life and into that of her character, and then into yet another existence as a battered Hollywood streetwalker.
There’s also material about the Gypsy curse and the film’s haunted prehistory, some fragments of a sinister thriller set in Poland (and spoken in Polish), an absurdist drawing-room comedy involving a family of giant rabbits wearing clothes (with a cameo by Naomi Watts as one of the rabbits) and tons of standard Lynchian ominous images of Laura Dern wandering through dark locations. That’s without mentioning the chorus of Hollywood hookers doing the Locomotion, or the dynamite musical number that unfolds behind the closing credits and has nothing to do with the rest of the movie.
So yeah. Definately a David Lynch movie.
I can’t wait.