2023-05-30 10:44:37
It’s a scene ofEyes Wide Shut well known: invited with his wife to a luxurious Christmas reception, Bill Hartford (Tom Cruise) is picked up by two lovely young women. The trio move forward arm in arm, until one of them announces to the doctor that they are taking him away. where the rainbow is. » In the important body of quotations that make up Lynch/Ozthis excerpt fromEyes Wide Shut illustrates both the aesthetic construction of Alexandre O Philippe’s film (which constantly seeks rhyme and correspondence) and the analytical impasse of the discourses it deploys – among others those of John Waters, Karyn Kusama or Rodney Ascher.
It is precisely to the latter, director of Room 237which we owe the extract from Kubrick, almost totally irrelevant, except to consider that he mentions a ” Rainbow and that it would therefore distantly echo the Wizard of Oz. Everything would therefore be in everything: Oz in Lynch and Lynch in Kubrick (unless it is the reverse), which the film seeks to demonstrate through an impressive collage of sequences aimed at illustrating the (admitted) influence of Wizard of Oz in Lynch’s work. It’s his side mashup fetishist, which hardly comes as a surprise from a director whose work of obsessive exegesis has already been spotted and chronicled in these columns. The Exorcist. In the case of Lynch, however, this approach, far from bearing fruit, quickly gets lost in the logic of a marabout, a piece of string isolating motifs from Fleming’s film (the red shoes of Dorothy, the witch) or certain of his narrative schemes (the innocent figure sucked into a strange world, the return home) to bring them back in the form of copy-pastes to Sailor & Lula, Twin Peaks et Mulholland Drive. If these correspondences, illustrated in certain places by split-screens confusing resemblance, can possibly surprise, they ultimately teach nothing new about Lynch. Worse, they tend to obscure the reading of a work that is actually more accessible than is said and only half-open certain doors that would have made it possible to better understand it.
On this point, the most interesting moment of the film undoubtedly remains the one where John Waters wonders about the recurrence of the imaginary fifties at Lynch: the analysis is illustrated by the choice of particularly relevant excerpts (Nicolas Cage taking up Elvis in Sailor & Lula ; Bobby Vinton’s song opening Blue Velvet ; the character of James in Twin Peaks) that the assembly brings closer to Cry Baby, as if to signal a dialogue between two filmmakers that we would probably not bring together spontaneously. At this point, the film abandons its fetish compilation project; without needing to be convinced of the relationship with Oz, nor even of the interest of the comparison, we let ourselves be seduced and carried away, like Bill Hartford on his New Year’s Eve. Lynch then no longer appears as a hermetic genius but as an artist in solidarity with his country, always in phase with the American imagination, in particular that, flamboyant, of the 1950s, which still shines in Mulholland Drive. The filmmaker’s recent appearance at Spielberg in the role of John Ford confirms an impression that Alexandre O Philippe’s film could and should have created: rather than a feeling of strangeness about which we have already profusely commented, a certain to tradition, a fidelity of the director to the symbols of American culture and even, perhaps, a continuity with classic cinema. This was undoubtedly the phantom object of the film, drowned in a sum of commentaries as pointillist as they are pointless. That Rodney Ascher is invited to the party (I would even say, to this orgy of exegesis) should not mislead the viewer: Lynch/Oz in short leaves the same feeling of frustration and leads to the same analytical impasse as Room 237.
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#Review #LynchOz #Alexandre #Philippe