| Inland Empire | |
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Theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | David Lynch |
| Produced by | David Lynch Mary Sweeney Jeremy Alter Laura Dern Marek Żydowicz |
| Written by | David Lynch |
| Starring | Laura Dern Jeremy Irons Justin Theroux Harry Dean Stanton Julia Ormond |
| Music by | David Lynch Krzysztof Penderecki |
| Cinematography | David Lynch |
| Editing by | David Lynch |
| Studio | Absurda |
| Distributed by | 518 Media (US) StudioCanal (France) |
| Release date(s) | September 6, 2006 (VFF) December 6, 2006 (United States) February 7, 2007 (France) April 27, 2007 (Poland) |
| Running time | 180 minutes |
| Country | France Poland United States |
| Language | English Polish |
| Box office | $4,028,293[1] |
Inland Empire, sometimes styled as INLAND EMPIRE, is a 2006 mystery film[2] written and directed by David Lynch. It was his first feature-length film since 2001's Mulholland Drive, and shares many similarities with that film. It premiered in Italy at the Venice Film Festival on September 6, 2006.[3] The feature took two and a half years to complete, and was Lynch's first film to have been shot entirely in standard definition digital video.[3] The film is a co-production of France, Poland, and the United States.
The cast includes such Lynch regulars as Laura Dern, Justin Theroux, Harry Dean Stanton and Grace Zabriskie, as well as Jeremy Irons and Diane Ladd. There are also very brief appearances by Nastassja Kinski, William H. Macy, Laura Harring, Terry Crews, Mary Steenburgen, and Ben Harper. The voices of Harring, Naomi Watts, and Scott Coffey are included in excerpts from Lynch's Rabbits website project.
It was named the second-best film of 2007 (tied with two others) by Cahiers du cinéma,[4] and listed among Sight & Sound's "thirty best films of the 2000s", as well as The Guardian's "10 most underrated movies of the decade".[5]
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The film opens to the sound of a gramophone playing Axxon N, “the longest-running radio play in history”. Meanwhile, a young prostitute, identified in the credits as the "Lost Girl", cries while watching television in a hotel room, following an unpleasant encounter with her client. The Lost Girl’s television displays a family of surreal anthropomorphic rabbits who speak in cryptic statements. These three elements become recurring motifs throughout Inland Empire.
The majority of the first act takes place in Los Angeles. A local actress named Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) has applied for a comeback role in a film entitled On High in Blue Tomorrows. The day before the audition, Nikki is visited by an enigmatic old woman from Poland (Grace Zabriskie) who claims to be her neighbour. The old woman insists that Nikki has won the role, and recounts two Polish folk tales. One tells of a boy who, sparking a reflection after passing through a doorway, “caused evil to be born”. The other tells of a girl who, wandering through an alleyway behind a marketplace, “discovers a palace”. The old woman presses Nikki for details on her new film, asking whether the story is about marriage and involves murder. Nikki denies both, but her neighbour violently insists that she is wrong. Disregarding Nikki’s troubled response, the old woman comments on the confusion of time, claiming that were this tomorrow, Nikki would be sitting on a couch adjacent to them. The film then pans to where the neighbour is pointing, and we see Nikki and two girlfriends sitting on the couch. Her butler walks into the living room – where the old woman no longer reclines – with a phone call from her agent, announcing that she has won the role. Ecstatic, Nikki and her friends celebrate while her husband Piotrek (Peter J. Lucas) ominously surveys them from atop a nearby stairwell.
Some time later, Nikki and her co-star Devon Berk (Justin Theroux) receive an interview on a talk show called The Marilyn Levees Show. The host (Diane Ladd) asks both actors whether they are having an affair, to which each of them respond negatively. Devon has been warned by his entourage that Nikki is out-of-bounds, due to her husband’s power and influence. Later, on the set being built for the film, Nikki and Devon rehearse a scene with the director Kingsley (Jeremy Irons). They are interrupted by a disturbance, but Devon finds nothing upon investigation. Shaken by the event, Kingsley confesses that they are shooting a remake of a German feature entitled 47. Production was abandoned after both leads were murdered, creating rumours of the film being cursed due to its roots in an old Polish folk tale.
Immersed in her character "Sue", Nikki appears to begin an affair with Devon – under the guise of his own character "Billy". While filming a scene in which her character buys groceries, Nikki notices a door in the alley marked Axxon N, and enters. It leads to a room behind the studio, where she can see herself rehearsing her lines weeks earlier. When Devon is sent to find who's lurking backstage, Nikki realizes that she was the disturbance, causing her to flee among the half-built backgrounds and into the house of another character named Smithy. Despite the set being merely a wooden facade, Nikki enters to find an illuminated suburban house inside. Devon looks through the windows, but sees only darkness.
At this point, the film takes a drastic stylistic turn. Various plotlines and scenes begin to entwine and complement each other. The chronological order is often confused or nonexistent. Inside the house, Nikki finds her husband in bed. Hiding from him, she encounters a troupe of prostitutes. One of the women advises her to “gaze through a burn hole in the silk”. Nikki complies and witnesses several strange happenings – many of which seem to revolve around her, or an alternate version of herself.
The woman who plays Doris Side - Billy’s wife in the film (Julia Ormond), tells a policeman that she has been hypnotized to murder someone with a screwdriver – but finds the screwdriver embedded in her own side. A mysterious organization claims to have captives from Inland Empire. In the past, Polish prostitutes are confronted by strange pimps while murder permeates their city. Nikki, having become one of the prostitutes in the present, wanders the streets while her companions directly ask the audience “Who is she?” Both Nikki and her prostitutes frequently ask people to look at them, and say whether “you've known me before”. In a parallel plotline, Sue climbs the dark staircase behind a nightclub to deliver a long monologue to a police detective named Mr. K – which touches upon her childhood molestations, disastrous relationships and revenge missions. Her husband Smithy seems to be connected with both the pimps and the organization – and is said to be good with animals, hence his job with a circus from Poland. There is much talk of The Phantom, an elusive hypnotist. Convinced she’s being stalked by a red-lipped man, Sue arms herself with a screwdriver.
Finally, Sue walks down Hollywood Boulevard, and is startled to see her doppelgänger across the street. Before Sue can investigate, Doris arrives and attempts to kill her, having been hypnotized by The Phantom. Sue is brutally stabbed in the stomach with her own screwdriver, causing her to stagger down the street and eventually collapse next to some homeless people on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. An Afro-American woman remarks that Sue is dying, then proceeds to debate with another, younger homeless woman about taking a bus to Pomona. Her companion talks at length about a friend named Niko – the prostitute whose blond wig makes her look like a movie star, thus allowing her to walk through the rich district without drawing attention. The Afro-American woman comforts Sue by holding a lighter in front of her face, until she finally dies, “having no more blue tomorrows”. Off-camera, Kingsley yells “cut”, and the camera pans back to show this has merely been a film scene.
As the actors and film crew wrap for the next scene, Sue slowly arises, Nikki once more. Kingsley announces that her scenes for the film are complete. In a daze, Nikki wanders off set and into a nearby cinema, where she sees not only On High in Blue Tomorrows – encompassing some of the subplots of the film – but events that are currently occurring. She wanders to the projection room, but finds an apartment building marked *Axxon N*. Eventually, Nikki confronts the red-lipped man from earlier, now known to be The Phantom. She shoots him, which causes his face to morph first into a distorted copy of Nikki's own face, but then into something resembling a foetus bleeding from its mouth.
Nikki flees into a nearby room – Room 47, which houses the rabbits on television, though she fails to see them. Elsewhere in the building, Nikki finds The Lost Girl, who has been watching and crying all along. The two women kiss, before Nikki fades away into the light along with the rabbits. The Lost Girl runs out of the hotel and into Smithy’s house, where she happily embraces a man and child.
Nikki is then seen back home, triumphantly smiling at the old woman from the beginning of the film. The concluding scene takes place at her house, where she sits with many other people, among them Laura Harring, Nastassja Kinski and Ben Harper. A one-legged woman who was mentioned in Sue's monologue looks around and says, “Sweet!” Niko, the girl with the blonde wig and monkey, can also be seen. The end credits roll over a group of women dancing to Nina Simone's "Sinnerman" while a lumberjack saws a log to the beat.
Lynch shot the film without a complete screenplay. Instead, he handed each actor several pages of freshly written dialogue each day.[3] In a 2005 interview, he described his feelings about the shooting process: "I’ve never worked on a project in this way before. I don’t know exactly how this thing will finally unfold... This film is very different because I don’t have a script. I write the thing scene by scene and much of it is shot and I don’t have much of a clue where it will end. It’s a risk, but I have this feeling that because all things are unified, this idea over here in that room will somehow relate to that idea over there in the pink room."[6] Interviewed at the Venice Film Festival, Laura Dern admitted that she didn't know what Inland Empire was about or the role she was playing, but hoped that seeing the film's premiere at the festival would help her "learn more."[3] Justin Theroux has also stated that he "couldn't possibly tell you what the film's about, and at this point I don't know that David Lynch could. It's become sort of a pastime—Laura [Dern] and I sit around on set trying to figure out what's going on."[7]
Much of the project was shot in Łódź, Poland, with local actors, such as Karolina Gruszka, Krzysztof Majchrzak, Leon Niemczyk, Piotr Andrzejewski and artists of the local circus Cyrk Zalewski. Some videography was also done in Los Angeles, and in 2006 Lynch returned from Poland to complete filming. Inland Empire is the first Lynch feature to be completely shot in digital video; it was shot with a Sony DSR-PD150. Lynch has stated that he will no longer use film to make motion pictures.[8]
In an NPR "Weekend Edition" interview, Laura Dern recounted a conversation she had with one of the movie's new producers.[9] He asked if Lynch was joking when he requested a one-legged woman, a monkey and a lumberjack by 3:15. "Yeah, you're on a David Lynch movie, dude," Dern replied. "Sit back and enjoy the ride." Dern reported that by 4 p.m. they were shooting with the requested individuals.
Lynch financed much of the production from his own resources, with longtime artistic collaborator and ex-wife Mary Sweeney producing. The film was also partially financed by the French production company StudioCanal, which had provided funding for three previous Lynch films. StudioCanal wanted to enter the film in the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, but it was not ready in time. Instead, it premiered at Italy's Venice Film Festival on September 6, 2006, where David Lynch also received the Golden Lion lifetime achievement award for his "contributions to the art of cinema." The film premiered in the United States on October 8, 2006 at the New York Film Festival, selling out both showings. The film received a limited release in the US beginning on December 15, 2006; distribution was handled by the specialist company 518 Media.[10]
Lynch hoped to distribute the film independently, saying that with the entire industry changing, he thought he would attempt a new form of distribution as well.[11] He acquired the rights to the DVD and worked out a deal with Studio Canal in an arrangement that allows him to distribute the film himself, through both digital and traditional means.[12] A North American DVD release occurred on August 14, 2007. Among other special features, the DVD included a 75-minute featurette, "More Things That Happened", which compiled footage elaborating on Sue's marriage to Smithy, her unpleasant life story, the Phantom's influence on women, and the lives of the prostitutes on Hollywood Boulevard.
When asked about Inland Empire, Lynch responded that it is "about a woman in trouble, and it's a mystery, and that's all I want to say about it."[7] When presenting screenings of the digital work, Lynch sometimes offers a clue in the form of a quotation from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: "We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe."[13][14]
[T]he structure of Inland Empire differs from prior Lynch films, Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive. It is neither a Möbius strip that endlessly circles around itself, nor is it divisible into sections of fantasy and reality. Its structure is more akin to a web where individual moments hyperlink to each other and other Lynch films -- hence the musical number that closes the film which contains obvious allusions to everything from Blue Velvet to Twin Peaks.
Richard Peña, an New York Film Festival official and one of the first people to see Inland Empire, has summarized the film as "a plotless collection of snippets that explore themes Lynch has been working on for years," including "a Hollywood story about a young actress who gets a part in a film that might be cursed; a story about the smuggling of women from Eastern Europe; and an abstract story about a family of people with rabbit heads sitting around in a living room"[7] -- Lynch's web-only video series, Rabbits. Peña's perception of a plot involving "the smuggling of women from Eastern Europe" stems from a scene in which one man asks another, in Polish, if he is selling the woman in the room.
The scholar Delorme indicated that the film is about adultery, but in a way that Lynch "avoid[s] a chronological unfolding of the scenes and situations provoked by the adultery", but rather "superimpose[s] them instead in as many scenarios developing from the potentials of the adultery", so that "[t]he narrative is constructed on strange characters brought together by a similar terror."[16]
The film debuted on several film festivals around the world most notably the Venice Film Festival in Italy, New York Film Festival in New York, United States, the Thessaloniki Film Festival in Greece, Camerimage Film Festival in Poland, Fajr International Film Festival in Iran, International Film Festival Rotterdam in the Netherlands, San Francisco Independent Film Festival in San Francisco, United States, Festival Internacional de Cine Contemporáneo de la Ciudad de México in México City, Mexico, Cinema Digital Seoul in South Korea and !f Istanbul International Independent Film Festival in Turkey. In late 2007 it was released in Iceland. The company that showed "Inland Empire" is called Grænaljósið or "The Greenlight".
Inland Empire was released and distributed by RYKO to the United States on August 14, 2007.[17] it was released on August 20, 2007 in the United Kingdom,[18] released on October 4, 2007 in Belgium and the Netherlands and distributed by A-Film)[19] and on August 6, 2008 and Distributed by Madman Entertainment in Australia.[20]
Overall the film has been well-received by critics. The New York Times classified Inland Empire as "fitfully brilliant" after the Venice Film Festival screening. Peter Travers, the film critic for Rolling Stone magazine wrote, "My advice, in the face of such hallucinatory brilliance, is that you hang on."[21] The New Yorker was one of the few publications to offer any negative points about the film, calling it a "trenchant, nuanced film" that "quickly devolves into self-parody".[22] Jonathan Ross, presenter of the BBC programme Film 2007, described it as "a work of genius... I think."[23] Damon Wise of Empire Magazine gave it five stars, calling it "A dazzling and exquisitely original riddle as told by an enigma"[24] and Jim Emerson (editor of RogerEbert.com) gave it 4 stars and praised it: "When people say Inland Empire is Lynch's Sunset Boulevard, Lynch's Persona, or Lynch's 8½, they're quite right, but it also explicitly invokes connections to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou, Buñuel and Dali's Un Chien Andalou, Maya Deren's LA-experimental Meshes of the Afternoon (a Lynch favorite), and others".[25] However, Carina Chocano of the Los Angeles Times wrote that "the film, which begins promisingly, disappears down so many rabbit holes (one of them involving actual rabbits) that eventually it just disappears for good."[26]
Laura Dern received almost universal acclaim for her performance, with many reviews describing it as her finest to date.[27] Lynch attempted to promote Dern's chances of an Academy Award for Best Actress nomination at the 2007 Academy Awards by campaigning with a live cow.[28] She was not nominated for the award.
The film holds a 72% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes; the consensus states "Typical David Lynch fare: fans of the director will find Inland Empire seductive and deep. All others will consider the heady surrealism impenetrable and pointless."[29]
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