Happy Birthday to Me!!!!

About 7 years back when I was just starting discover Cinema, I accidentally met with this Lynch's masterpiece. It was in DVD back then, one of my friends told me to just experience it. And I did and what experience it was. I was playing detective for weeks just to find answers to this film. What it meant? What happened to some characters? Was it all just a dream?

Today as I turn 24, I decided to revisit this and yes it has been 7 years since I watched it.

Betty arrives in the city of dreams Los Angeles to become an actress. She meets a woman in her aunts place who just had an accident last night. Betty starts to ask her about who she is? Does she know her aunt? As the mystery starts to unfold slowly we are also meeting with Adam, a director who has been strong armed to cast an actress named Camilla in his upcoming film.

From the start there is this mystic atmosphere gathered. You are in a daze, searching for answers to the questions which pop up every minute or second. But for me it all seemed like a dream of a woman who aspired to be all this as her reality crashed in front of her.

The last act which sweeps in a moment the blue box is opened, we are turned into a reality that we never expected. As you look closer it kind of shifts between time of relationship between Diane and Camilla. We start to get the point of the first and second act of the movie, piecing in all the stacks of puzzles joining them.

It is like Diane creates her own universe of dreams. If this would have happened then were she would be? Her happiness, her success, the role which went to someone other than herself. Her relationship with Camilla/Rita, got to give it Lynch on focusing on the poster of Rita Hayworth.

Written and Directed by David Lynch, he has created his won cinematic universe over the years. Mulholland Drive has a feel like Twin Peaks. The dreams, the room, the color, the relationship told in colors, physical appearances.

Naomi Watts gives one of the best performance I have ever seen. She grasps the identity of these two women, one with hope, dreams and love while other in her own misery and failures which conspired her to take a step that ends in her own dismissal. For me Naomi Watts will always be my favorite actress of all time alongside with Ingird Bergman.

Laura Elena Harring plays the perfect support to Naomi's character. She is vulnerable, the need for Betty to be loved and care for someone.

Mulholland Drive is a mystery on its own folded in questions that play withing the clues if you pay attention. At times it felt like David Lynch's Persona. Like the scene where Rita gets the key while Betty has disappeared or the scenes where the characters are are molded into one.

It is clever, multi layered, dream within a dream, twisted, beautiful, strange, suspense and all in all one of the best movies of 21st Century.

It may be a reality or a dream or even a alternate universe altogether.

This is the best movie I could have watched for my Birthday!!!