David Lynch
Cuore selvaggio

This is a film without half measures, you either love it or hate it. Like all of David Lynch's cinema, which critics, when they're in a good mood, call "dreamlike." I lean towards the former and am more than happy to take home the entire oeuvre of the Montana director. It's not a film for refined tastes, it doesn't satisfy the viewer but hits straight in the stomach, playing on their primal impulses. It's "Wild At Heart," winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1990. Highly deserved.

Here you truly witness the wonders of a brilliant mind in action. The story is apparently simple. A young ex-con, Sailor, played by Nicolas Cage, on parole, and his girlfriend Lula (the gorgeous Laura Dern, the director's muse) try to escape to Texas to start a new life, all sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll, and maybe even have kids. The young and rebellious couple is fleeing from her terrible mother (in both real life and fiction, since Diane Ladd is really Dern's mother), a true persecution, a combat hound, who pours all her resentment on Sailor. During their reckless escape attempt, the two encounter caricature-like characters: the Mexican prostitute played by Isabella Rossellini—with bright red lips and attire that highlights the character's physical assets—the itinerant student Sheryl Lee, at the center of perhaps the most shocking episode, a victim of a car accident still holding brain remains in her hands, a real walking dead, and especially Willem Dafoe as a criminal with a disfigured face. A true nightmare creature, his, a serpent with decayed teeth, a Lucifer who attempts to seduce Lula only to withdraw from the game by humiliating her. Don't miss the exchange between the two, with that insistent "Fuck me" whispered by Bobby Peru to the terrified girl.

Just as there are plenty of scenes to hit rewind on. The first, outside the penitentiary, on the stairs, with Sailor moving between guns, blood, carnival faces, screams, and tears, faces in extreme close-up, mouths agape, and Ladd's jaws spitting hate. The sex between the protagonists, violent and rapacious (nothing like "famolo strano"), where Lula always wears fuchsia outfits and black latex, a true sex bomb. And all the encounters on their path, filled with tension.

It makes you laugh, gives you chills, it's shocking, it's Lynch cubed.

At the beginning, who else would put Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" for the shootout sequence? Yet it fits perfectly. Beauty and the grotesque travel together. Right after, an ultra-heavy metal track by the Powermat: "Mattatoio." A schizophrenic soundtrack, filled with sudden changes, just like the film.

It could be a noir, but it doesn't have such dark tones or gloomy atmospheres, nor is it overly cynical. It's wild America inside, a paradigm of a wicked world.
It could be a splatter movie, but it stops short. It's Jackson Pollock with touches of Basquiat.

Lynch's multiple talents emerge: not just a director but also a painter, illustrator, and photographer. This is how he made a living in his youth, and this versatility has spilled over into his cinema.