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Writer-director David Lynch has designed it as a dream that drifts in one direction, blows suddenly into another and confounds attempts to define it in linear terms.
For about two-thirds of its 146 minutes, it traces several tracks, some of them related, some never to intersect, many abandoned without further reference.
But as the film nears the two-hour mark, it chucks whatever expectations it has fostered and makes a series of reversals that will intrigue Lynch aficionados, perplex everyone and infuriate those looking for explanations.
Undoubtedly, it helps to know that 'Mulholland Drive' was designed and most of it filmed as a 1999 pilot for an open-ended TV series that never sold. With additional financing, Lynch shot more scenes in 2000 and tailored it for theatrical release.
It is vintage Lynch, for better and worse - a surrealistic wade into an incomprehensible landscape, the one suggested in 'Blue Velvet' and cultivated further in 'Twin Peaks,' which 'Mulholland Drive' most closely resembles in style. It defies definitive interpretation because no one explanation satisfies literal evidence.
It's a film in which the two main performers play women who are looking for roles to fill. One is a hopeful actress just off the plane in Los Angeles; the other has suffered a concussion and can't remember who she is.
In the latter phases of 'Mulholland Drive,' one character puts on a wig that makes her look more like the other. Still later, the same performers assume different parts altogether.
That, Lynch seems to be saying, is the nature of role-playing in the world capital of portrayals, reinventions of personal identities, wish fulfillments and dream manufacturing.
The blonde Betty (Naomi Watts) arrives in Los Angeles from Canada to live in her Aunt Ruth's apartment while Ruth is off making a picture. As perky and optimistic as a naive, aspiring actress can be, Betty plans to audition at film studios.
An unidentified brunette (Laura Elena Harring), who is marked for death by two hit men on pricey Mulholland Drive, escapes two kinds of death with one car wreck that is fatal to other people.
The brunette, stymied by amnesia, takes refuge in the same apartment where Betty is staying. The brunette glances at a 'Gilda' poster and identifies herself by actress Hayworth's first name, Rita.
In true film noir mode, but with women in both roles, Betty begins helping Rita investigate her identity. Could Rita be someone named Diane Selwyn?
The other primary of the many threads involves young film director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), who resists casting someone named Camilla Rhodes as the lead in his movie.
He's coerced to do so by menacing people such as the Castigliane brothers (Dan Hedaya and 'Mulholland' composer Angelo Badalmenti), a dwarf in a wheelchair (Michael J. Anderson) and the Cowboy (Monty Montgomery), who says a line that could creep into the lexicon of movie trivia: 'You will see me one more time if you do good. You will see me two more times if you do bad.'
When Diane finally appears, she's portrayed by Watts in a dual role (to the extent characters can be defined at all by their initial identities). But are we to think Diane represents a future, harder manifestation of Betty?
Harring later appears as Camilla Rhodes. But was she always?
By the time we've entered an alternate reality, it's not clear (Would it ever be with Lynch?) what information and people from earlier scenes have a relationship to the present 'reality.'
Despite relatively high billing, Robert Forster vanishes after one early scene in which he plays a cop who speaks in TV police jargon. Other stars having cameos include Billy Ray Cyrus, Lee Grant and Chad Everett.
No one acts naturally. Almost every line is delivered in italics, to suggest a cryptic subtext.
The main exception is veteran actress-tap dancer Ann Miller, who plays the landlady Coco Lenoix with so (refreshingly) direct an attack on the role that she doesn't seem to be in the same movie.
Some might feel the self-conscious breaks in the rhythm of dialogue makes the delivery pretentious.
Admirers of Lynch, with his lack of interest in narrative discipline, require no defense or interpretation of him. They thrive on chewing over their own. He introduces and leaves so much content, any analysis might satisfy one moment or another.
In that one regard, he's like the dissimilarly exasperating Jean-Luc Godard, whose movies aren't about what they say as much as they are about the re-conceptualization of film and narrative form.
They are ultimately as unfathomable as a dream that forms in a half-awake state, after an alarm clock has rung and one clings for a final few seconds to notions that defy complete sense.
Ed Blank can be reached at (412) 854-5555 or eblank@tribweb.com .
