In celebration of filmmaker David Lynch’s canon of titillating, surrealistic mysteries, the historic Ojai Playhouse screened a mini-film festival of the director’s best work over the MLK weekend. Along with films like Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and Lost Highway, the event also offered a new theatrical work, a pleasantly bizarre one-act based on the Lynchian style and aesthetic. Titled Desert Films (written by James Franco, directed by Franco and Peter Gold, and starring Franco and Blaine Kern III), the play is an unexpected tarantella of offbeat intensity and peculiar comedy.
This homage to Lynch’s partiality to stories of dreamlike violence holds strangeness in sacred regard. Desert Films has Franco playing actor Robert Blake, who is in turn playing his disturbing, pale-faced character from Lost Highway. The play opens with Blake taping an abductee, a young actor (Kern), to a chair. “Blake” pressures his victim into reading the part of Bonnie, Blake’s murdered wife, in an original script ostensibly prepared to push the idea of Blake’s innocence (or at least his justification) in the matter of Bonnie’s untimely death. Blake films the encounter and streams the jerky footage on a screen behind them, providing the audience with constant, alienating close-up angles of both actors.
Desert Films is a firing squad of dark humor with plenty of exploratory banter about the psyche of the actor, the motives of those running the “Hollywood machine,” and the curated reality seen in movies, on TV, and in social media. Overall, Desert Films’ multimedia approach and employment of unwanted intimacy effectively creates the kind of unsettling energy that exemplifies Lynch’s vision.
You must be logged in to post a comment.