This is probably the closest that Lynch has come to doing full-on homage to someone like Ingmar Bergman, via Gifford's script, by ding very simply shot but emotionally complex character work. It could even be just a play it's that stripped down (though not altogether detached from Lynch's peccadillo's). Crispin Glover plays a small-town guy who stays in the same hotel room from the other two shorts with his love, played by Alicia Witt, who's sort of slow and affected mind-wise, but has a lot to say about Chinese fish and seeing things like their future children.
Witt has a look like the classic Bergman actresses, and the dialog even goes further than Bergman, maybe back to Ibsen, in capturing the tense but always powerfully human tradition of characters who are disconnected from one another, but wanting to be close as possible, through revelations in behavior and stark details. Glover, in a rare instance, plays a guy who is the straight character (straight as possible anyway). In the Barry Lyndon-esquire candle-lit lighting, Lynch makes this all so spare that it seems like the farthest thing removed from an quagmire like Inland Empire.
But in its own way, Lynch is experimenting just as much in getting inside the nature of a character's psychology, and it's refreshing to see him let the actors find their own beats in the performances.
Witt has a look like the classic Bergman actresses, and the dialog even goes further than Bergman, maybe back to Ibsen, in capturing the tense but always powerfully human tradition of characters who are disconnected from one another, but wanting to be close as possible, through revelations in behavior and stark details. Glover, in a rare instance, plays a guy who is the straight character (straight as possible anyway). In the Barry Lyndon-esquire candle-lit lighting, Lynch makes this all so spare that it seems like the farthest thing removed from an quagmire like Inland Empire.
But in its own way, Lynch is experimenting just as much in getting inside the nature of a character's psychology, and it's refreshing to see him let the actors find their own beats in the performances.
