Friday, February 4, 2011
Film Pick of the Day: David Lynch's Lost Highway at Midnight
Posted by Jim Ridley on Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 5:07 AM
Lost Highway
Where: The Belcourt
When: Fri., Feb. 4, 11:59 p.m. and Sat., Feb. 5, 11:59 p.m.
David Lynch’s enigmatic film-noir riff left audiences and critics scratching their heads in 1997, but today it looks like the first — and in many senses, the wildest — of his experiments in narrative disjunction. It’s a fascinating puzzle driven by the director’s characteristic obsessions: the duality of identity, the demonizing power of sexuality, the totemic significance of the mundane. The bisected plot is a partial spin on Hitchcock’s Vertigo, or even Pulp Fiction: Parallel noir universes collide, intersect and eventually fuse, with a smitten dupe (Bill Pullman, Hollywood’s craziest normal-looking leading man) and a mysterious femme fatale (Patricia Arquette, who burns through the movie like a slutty comet) morphing into different identities.
Abounding in feverish new sensations — like Arquette’s second entrance, staged in heart-stopping slow motion to Lou Reed’s “This Magic Moment” — it’s one of Lynch’s most exciting movies. And let’s just say that after his appearance here, Robert Blake’s murder trial didn’t exactly come as a shock.
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