Review of Blue Velvet (1986) by Filipeneto — 06 Sep 2020

David Lynch is not a director who appeals to everyone. He has a technique and a style that is his alone, and where the seemingly perfect world that we see with the naked eye often coexists, promiscuously, with all the rot that only in nightmares we can imagine. He is a director who likes to take what is apparently perfect and immaculate and show the rotten hidden side. And that is precisely what we see in this film, which is not perfect but it is difficult to remain indifferent.

This film could be seen as an adult fable as the protagonist, a young man named Jeffrey Beaumont, feels compelled to take curiosity to the last consequences after finding an ear cut in a field. When starting an investigation parallel to the police, he discovers links between the ear he found and a bar singer who lives in isolation, and to whom a mobster kidnapped her husband and son to use her as a sexual object in bizarre erotic fantasies.

For me, this film is quite surreal and creates around its story and its characters a purposefully surreal and dreamlike environment, as if it were telling us a dream or nightmare. This helps us to understand the biggest problem of the film: the lack of logic in the behavior of characters. On the one hand, we have a young man who feels so curious that he is unable to understand that he is going too far. It does not control himself, just as we do not control ourselves when we are dreaming. On the other hand we have Dorothy Vallens, a deeply sexualized singer who acts incoherently, but who can perfectly symbolize the erotic fantasies repressed in a dream. To top it off we have Frank, the most obvious psychopathic killer in cinema, with random, perverted behavior that screams instead of talking, but that expresses all the anger that we often dare to express only in dreams.

The cult status that the film has achieved over time and the way it catapulted David Lynch's career has allowed the actors to have benefited equally. Kyle MacLachlan achieves quite a good performance. Isabella Rossellini also gives us one of the most important roles in her career, despite having a forced and irritating accent. Dennis Hooper was good at bringing Frank to life and looks really menacing. There is still space to mention Laura Dern's good performance, in a sweet and very restrained paper.

Technically, it is a colossal film and where cinematography has been used masterfully. There are a lot of truly impressive camera angles and shooting plans, particularly at the beginning and end of the film. The use of color and light, and later the shadow and night, were elements that Lynch knew how to make the most of. Not being a film where the effects have a lot of time, we have time to appreciate the sets, thought in detail, the choice of some colors and the way some characters connect to them (think, for example, that the Dorothy's apartment is dominated by warm colors like red, and the rich symbology surrounding the blue velvet robe). Another detail that was meticulously thought out was the soundtrack, truly impressive and a welcome help in creating the environment.