Lost Highway

Monday, May 26, 2008

This must have been the inspiration for Michael Haneke's Cache, right? I mean, the set-up is the same: a couple starts receiving odd videotapes of someone watching their house. They feel weirded out, a little paranoid. Lost Highway really just breezes past that concept, and turns into your standard Lynchian film-noir-in-hell kinda movie, and the whole videotape subplot never exactly feels like it gets resolved, at least not clearly. So it's like maybe Haneke was fascinated with the story of the tapes, and wanted to develop that idea, resolve that plot. So of course he makes a strange, mysterious film that deliberately never explains where the tapes come from.

Some day, someone will adopt this premise again and actually explain who's sending the tapes. I hope. Although I guess it would be cool if directors kept returning to this idea, and each time deliberately don't answer the mystery.

This was my third or fourth time seeing Lost Highway, and I always hope I'm gonna like it more than I do, because I love Lynch. But it remains one of his worst, and though I enjoy it overall, it just pales compared to his best work. At least, after seeing Inland Empire, it's no longer my least favorite of his... I mean, I do actually like it. It looks great, has a number of really cool scenes, definitely a lot of neat ideas, a very funny performance by Robert Loggia, and liberal doses of Patricia Arquette nudity. But whereas most Lynch movies are wildly entertaining, this one has a lot of slow spots, and most of the characters aren't very interesting.

Gotta love that part where the guy gets killed by being cranially impaled on the corner of a coffee table, though. Classic.