In case the recent completion – I hesitate to say “resolution” – of Twin Peaks has left a hole in your life the approximate shape and size of David Lynch’s soft-serve quiff, the DVD release of David Lynch: The Art Life (Thunderbird, 15) could not have been more cannily timed. Ostensibly a documentary about the aberrant auteur’s creative process, Jon Nguyen’s film is nothing so prosaic. Instead, it’s a wayward, stream-of-consciousness tour of a mind that knows no process, as related and embellished by the man himself, drolly revelling in formative anecdotes and dream fragments. Lynch’s ventures into fine art, as opposed to film, are the springboard for these musings, but it’s all of a piece, betraying the same fascinating, febrile imagination; it’s an internal portrait almost as eerily riveting as a Lynch original.
Keep the subtle shiver going with Mubi.com’s latest hand-picked exclusive: La Soledad, a blurred-at-the-edges documentary from Venezuela. The title alludes to a pervasive sense of isolation in the country’s crumbling social fringes; it’s also the name of a ruined, rambling Caracas mansion owned by the family of director Jorge Thielen Armand, now inhabited by a pinched working-class family who won’t be able to stay much longer. In a peculiar way, this is a study of economic downturn as ghost story: there’s a strange, delicate twinge of the supernatural in its folds, but the colonial house is really haunted by memories of previous, more affluent residents, of generations and possibilities that no longer exist for their inheritors.
Colossal (EIV, 15) is a high-concept curiosity worth seeking out simply for the brazen what-if extremes of its premise; teasing out the success or otherwise of its execution is part of the fun. Anne Hathaway is the errant, alcoholic writer who somehow – deep breath here – ascertains that her daily actions and errors are puppeteering the apocalyptic rampage of a Godzilla-type beast on the other side of the globe; what ensues is a woolly, genuinely anomalous fusion of brash monster movie and therapy drama, crying out for attention and analysis. Demanding merely the former, and hardly earning it, is Snatched (Fox, 15), a gunky, shrieky mom-com (right) that somehow already feels years old. Goldie Hawn’s long-missed, still sparky timing gives it a handful of redeeming points; shame she’s mostly cast as the straight woman to onscreen daughter Amy Schumer, whose usual straight-shooter act isn’t given any good punchlines to fire.
The last days of summer feel like the right moment to face the sharp, parched comic truths of Greek director Argyris Papadimitropoulos’s debut Suntan (Eureka, 18). A deeply discomfiting portrait of schlubby male midlife crisis in the face of oppressive island-holiday beauty, it sees the masculine ego elevated, taunted and tattered with ruthless, recognisable specificity. The cycles of insecurity, denial and release for older women, meanwhile, are negotiated with classic French elan in The Midwife (Curzon Artificial Eye, 12), a slight framework for two strong Catherines – Deneuve and Frot – to act their guts out.
Finally, either a warning, or a clarion call for connoisseurs of catastrophe: Sean Penn’s The Last Face (Lionsgate, 15), practically placed in cinematic quarantine after last year’s derided Cannes premiere, has slipped straight to DVD. It is, and I don’t wish to put too fine a point on this, one of the worst films ever made: a gaseously pompous white-saviour romance set in darkest war-torn Africa, where children are dying to the musical accompaniment of the Red Hot Chili Peppers while Charlize Theron and Javier Bardem fight out the bigger problem of their tempestuous attraction. “She’s leaking urine, but she’s still dancing!” one side player immortally observes of an abused African martyr; the same might be said of this perversely unforgettable film.
