Inland Empire (2006)

Appraisal (spoilers): After two viewings, I still haven't got the story right, that is if there really is one to start with. I have read dozens of theories, but I found none of them half satisfying. Therefore, I must judge this movie as a collage around some central ideas, in which strict logical and causal sense is not alway obeyed. The central themes, on a superficial analysis, seem to be Prostitution, Hollywood, Adultery, and Murder. The film's layout and structure seem to mimic the human mind, a notion previously used in The Shining (1980) (a scene of which is quoted in it) and As Deusas (1972). Several clues point to a two-way interaction, or even an exchange of roles, between real characters and imaginary ones, or maybe between dream and reality, as in Lewis Carroll's famous quandary in "Through the Looking Glass" in which he proposes that we might be somebody's dream, and wonders "what if he left off dreaming?".
Here are the clues:
--the announcer at the end of Marilyn Levens's show says: "where stars make dreams and dreams make stars"; notice how this apparently innocent sentence could be understood in a way that fits the strange theory of mutual interaction between Reality and Fiction.
-- when 'Kingsley' is explaining what happened in the Polish film he says "after the characters had been filming for some time". See? He doesn't say "after the actors had been filming", which would be the reasonable thing, but "after the characters had been filming", which is really odd. He goes on to say, in the same sentence, "they discovered something... inside the story. (...) The two leads were murdered!". Why "inside the story"? How can something "inside the story" affect the real world in any way? Now look at the whole sentence, all in one piece, and reordered: "the characters discovered that the leads were murdered, inside the story". Now, I am not sure what all this means, if anything; it could be that the characters are conscious entities, and suddenly the people who give them life (the leads) disappear; then what? ("what if he left off dreaming?"). And all this comes from the mouth of a character in IE, which is weird too.
-- The 'Phantom' character is looking for an "opening" and is seen both inside the OHIBT movie and outside of it. He is said to be able to disappear.

Well, these are consistent clues, but I'm still a long way from deciphering the dozens of riddles in this film. Anyway, the film succeeds partially at best, in my opinion; it is funny at times, and it establishes a mood that occasionally gets absorbing; it does, however, veer into self-indulgence and self-parody at quite a few occasions. It is unlikely that my opinion would be radically different had I deciphered all this apparent mess into a coherent plot or meaning of some sort; there is a level of obscurity beyond which Narrative Art ceases to be aesthetically efficient as such, and I suspect Inland Empire has crossed that line.

Rating: 47