There's good news and bad news about Lady Blue Shanghai, the latest short film in Dior's Lady Dior campaign featuring Marion Cotillard. The good news: It's a 16-minute effort directed by David Lynch, which means, regardless of its content, a new David Lynch film has arrived. Rejoice! The bad news: It really, really wants to sell you a handbag.
Furthermore, Lynch isn't breaking any new thematic or stylistic ground with this one: There's a woman. She's in distress. There's a mystery lover. They trot around Shanghai eluding mystery pursuers. Her experience isn't trustworthy, but guess what is? Exactly: That Dior handbag glowing with recollection in the middle of her hotel-room floor. At first imperiled, she learns to love the memory conveyed by what's actually in the bag.
At least I think that's what's going on. It's a fitting entry in Lynch's WTF female-identity-crisis continuum that began a decade ago with Mulholland Drive and folded in on itself in 2006's Inland Empire. That latter film's disgusting video sludge lends itself a little better to Lady Blue Shanghai, if only because of the exhibition format online. It's so much better when you're not bludgeoned with pixels and other video noise -- intentionally or otherwise. (A high-definition version is here.)
As far as LBS's provenance, it's Cotillard's third spot it the fashion label's behalf (she previously worked with her La Vie en Rose director Olivier Dahan as well), and to hear Lynch tell it:
"They called me up and said, 'Would you like to make a short film for the internet? You can do anything you want, you just need to show the handbag, the Pearl Tower and some old Shanghai.' [...] This falls between a regular film and a commercial. I liked that idea. There are adverts and people get hit hard, and then there is this, where it is like coming at it from a different angle."
"Ideas are what you want," continues Lynch, in typically enigmatic mood. "Everybody has machinery, and so when the idea passes through this machine it will come out a little different than if the same idea is passed through another machine."
Precisely! Excuse me?
ยท Lady Blue Shanghai [Dior via Movie City Indie]