Director David Lynch calls this 2001 psychological thriller "a love story in the city of dreams". It's noir, romance, thriller and drama... but even that doesn't sufficiently explain the plot.
Blonde Betty (Naomi Watts, pictured, left) arrives in Hollywood to stay in her aunt's empty apartment and audition for the movies. Rita (Laura Harring, pictured, right) is the brunette who escapes a mob murder when she crawls out of her crashed car on Mulholland Drive and stumbles into the same apartment with bruises and no memory.
The film is partly a story of the two women trying to trace Rita's identity, and partly a surreal, blackly comic look at Hollywood itself. It features pretentious moviemakers, coffee-crazy mobsters, wealthy dwarves, inept hitmen, tramps, psychics and cowboys. It is, in short, extremely odd.
Lynch, the man behind Blue Velvet and Wild At Heart, originally conceived Mulholland Drive as a TV series, similar to his sprawling Twin Peaks. However ABC TV executives rejected the pilot. However, having secured additional funding from French distributor Studio Canal, Lynch was able to shoot new scenes to wrap up the open ending and to turn the pilot into a feature film. Lynch received an Oscar nomination for Best Director and he won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival.