The service at Casbah was attentive, yet I found it to be TOO professional, detached and intrusive. However, that being said, it did not detract from our meals, nor from a lovely conversation of extraordinary circumstances.
Seeing orecchiette was offered, I had to try it, given my great love of the dish at Sergio’s. This dish paired the orecchiette with grilled chicken, dried cranberries, and capriole goat cheese in a sage cream sauce. It was good, and while I do like cranberries generally, I found the sweetness in the dish to not be to my liking. It was good, not great.
Namasté sampled the tuna tatare with shallots, garlic, chives, celery leaves, blood oranges with a creme fraiche pomegranate vinaigrette dressing and grilled sourdough paired with an
Arugula salad and crimini mushrooms, potatoes, and a goat cheese balsamic vinaigrette.
I could have easily spent the balance of the evening at that table, lost in conversation and companionship, but we had plans to partake in the long strange journey that is a David Lynch film – INLAND EMPIRE (he claims it needs to be capitalized).
So, hand in hand, off we went, submitting ourselves to the subconscious free association of the great auteur.
I knew that this was going to be a marathon, not a sprint, as the most definitely non-linear film clocks in at one merciful minute under three hours. But that is okay, as (film) time was about to collapse on itself, leaving identities (real and imagined and preformed) crushed and blurred almost beyond recognition – much like life itself. During this flexing of time and identity, I found myself safely moored in a space of perfect calm and harmony, watching artful scenes that willfully rebuked attempts at placing linear narrative upon them. However, in the reptile brain, there was a cohesiveness that made it all work – you don’t know what it was about, but you got it. I was still disappointed that it wasn’t as WEIRD as I thought it would be for we both expected it to be even MORE abstract, as the first hour or so is deceptively understandable.
Grace Zabriskie (Laura Palmer’s mother) shows up as Nikki’s ( a Hollywood actress played by Laura Dern) haunting and creepy neighbor who intuits a wee bit too much – informing Nikki that today is tomorrow, she’s gotten the part in a movie (about marriage and a murder?) and the movie is a remake — actually, a haunted remake of a Polish movie that was cursed by gypsies and never completed because the lead actors were murdered — the viewer is intrigued, but not entirely surprised. Because, clearly, something’s not right in general – you suspended your disbelief and go along on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.
Wonderful cameos abounded, from Dern’s mom, Diane Ladd, hilarious as a horrid entertainment show host, to William H. Macy, the gals from Mulholland Drive, and a Capuchin monkey, a lumberjack, a one-legged woman (as mentioned from the NPR interview), and most briefly, Natassia Kinski.
For my money, the best scenes of the film (following the introductory first hour that lulled us into a false sense of story) were the scenes of the needle on the LP, and Dern’s stunning performance when she is in the upstairs room talking to the insurance man/accountant/IRS agent (we couldn’t decide who he was). Her character in those scenes was riveting, and it was in those scenes that she delivered our favorite line:
I said,”He’s been reapin’ what he’s been sowin’.”
The cops say, “Fucker been sowin’ some heavy shit!”
So, that will give you an idea of the dialogue, since that was the stand-out line.
We found ourselves cheering the appearance of the rabbits in the Beckett-ish sitcom, and from time to time we were hoping the next scene would be a brief shot of Golden Retriever puppies romping through a field of daisies. But this is a blackhole Wonderland, and each rabbit hole leads to yet another rabbit hole, and another and another, fractures and facets of moments and emotions and sanity. Or not. “And yet”, I was safely anchored there in the theatre, and it was the shortest, happiest three hours I have spent in quite some time.
Says Lynch:
Cinema is sound and picture flowing together in sequences, like movements in a piece of music. Always the individual movements could stand on their own, but they’re part of a whole. I have to know what it means to me in order to be saying that I love this idea. But because some things are abstract, each person is going to get a different thing happening. . . . It’s the viewer that makes the thing the final thing.
Finally, Inland Empire isn’t a film to love. I cannot, in good conscious recommend anyone that I know or care about to endure it. That being said, it is an artwork to admire, to puzzle through, to wrestle with, today, yesterday or tomorrow.
And stay away from Hollywood and Vine if you know what is good for you.
