I didn’t see Inland Empire for a long time because the three-hour running time was an intimidating prospect for someone who frequently chooses what movie to watch based on its length. (Ninety-two minutes is perfect.) But Inland Empire is absorbing, and although it’s exhausting viewing, the film is certainly never boring.
After a visit by a spooky, story telling neighbour, Nikki (Laura Dern) finds herself cast as Susan in a film that turns out to be a remake of an abandoned film that was hindered by a Polish curse. At first things appear to be running quite smoothly, but she soon finds herself descending into a nightmarish, labyrinthine world that appears both real and fantastic, where multiple selves play out corresponding lives. Although the film appears to wrap, whether Nikki/Susan ever returns from this otherworld is unclear, the ending of the film both returning full circle, and at the same time going off again in a seemingly never ending train of events.
Those of you who know me know how much I love low end mini-DV cameras, and so I’m thrilled that David Lynch has jumped on this bandwagon, shooting Inland Empire on a PD-150. However, Lynch obviously stretches the capabilities of the camera through attachments, the incredibly wide angle shots that open the film suggest another lens has somehow been mounted onto the camera, which to my knowledge has a fairly small fixed lens. The capabilities of digital colour grading and colour effects have also been used brilliantly – the colours in the film are breathtaking.
Amy Taubin writes in Film Comment that ‘The PD-150 produces images that look like nothing but video’ (Jan-Feb, 2007, p57), and observes that the images ‘look as if they’re decomposing before your eyes’. The shots, with their noirish light-dark contrasts often fade off into black. In the sequences in the maze of hallways, the camera passes over the light fixtures, the light bringing the textures of the cement sharply into focus, then, as the camera moves on, these wonderfully tactile bumps and wells disintegrate into darkness. That the textures come up so clearly is one of the lovely qualities of digital video, and the ability to pull from a heightened sharpness to an abstract blur in a matter of seconds is one of my favourite traits of the medium.
Indeed, it seems that on many of the low end cameras with a basic manual focus setting, the area in which you get a sharply focused image is very slight, I have often spent some time sliding the focus in and out just to capture that moment where the picture becomes perfectly crisp, almost hyper–focused. Then if you pull it out of focus the picture goes to the point of being so blurry as to become abstract and painterly. Lynch uses this, and there are moments in Inland Empire where the image drifts off into pure abstraction. A scene in a strange Polish boardroom opens with a blur, the camera pulls focus on one of the men’s faces and the scene plays out. It closes by pulling back out of focus on the same man’s face.
Each scene in Inland Empire begins and ends quite neatly, often fading out into black, and it is as though they almost exist as tiny discrete films in themselves. As Nikki/Susan finds herself in one place then another, as she multiplies and collides with herself, we follow her in a pattern that follows a dream-logic of story moments. Lynch writes that he filmed without a script, making each scene as he came up with it, and perhaps this stream of consciousness style is made even more possible by the cheap, lightweight camera. Unlike its experimental and avant-garde counterparts, Inland Empire is a film that despite its non-linearity and non-narrative juxtaposition of images still retains a strong sense of story. At the start of the film, even more so than in Mullholland Drive, a clear story is set up, with the neighbour acting as a creepy, fairytale like seer, whose prophecies are then played out over the course of the film.
