The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, December 16-22
Lost Highway (1997)
Directed by David Lynch
“I like to remember things my own way…Not necessarily how they happened.” It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that André Bazin would’ve hated (or at least strongly disagreed with) Lynch’s late-90s take on the darkest undersides of film noir, adding his voice to the many critics of this oft-maligned masterstroke, overshadowed by its comparatively sunny doppelganger, Mulholland Dr. With its lack of deep focus and threateningly ambient sound design, Lost Highway is a defiantly oneiric work, albeit one that attempts to reconcile these abstractions with the legacy of the most idiosyncratic of noir, actively referencing oddities like Kiss Me Deadly and Angel Face to comprise its decidedly singular tone. Lynch’s obsession with split identities manifests itself most effectively here, in this bifurcated narrative of jealousy and guilt; burdens placed upon a saxophonist (Bill Pullman) who may or may not have killed his alternatingly-haired wife (Patricia Arquette). The synopsis may sound familiar, but the approach taken by Lynch is less hard-boiled than drenched in the sweat that comes with the anxiety that comes with knowing your preordained-by-genre doom. The digital noise that finds its way into both the soundtrack and the many instances of video-watching (an interest that preludes and foretells the grainy nightmares of Inland Empire) threatens to envelop you, to enhance your guilt and devour your consciousness until all there is is the sparsely illuminated highway, leading you down an irreversible path of depravity. Eric Barroso (December 18, 6:30pm; December 20, 2pm at the at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Lynch/Rivette”)