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Genre: Drama

Director: David Lynch

Writing Credits: Barry Gifford (Novel), David Lynch (Screenplay)

Certificate: 18s (Only suitable for persons 18 years of age or over).

I picked Wild At Heart to start Claudia's Classic Collection because the movie is a fairytale that brings back personal fairytale memories.  The first time I saw it was on a wide screen on the Isola Tiberina in Rome, in the middle of the Tevere River, a place out of this world itself, and Wild At Heart is a story that wants to bring you to another dimension.

The film is a modern adult fable explicitly inspired by the Wizard of Oz, to which it makes several and direct references.

Lynch chose the Wizard of Oz as inspiration to make a parody of American society, a culture based on big cars, gratuitous violence, weird sex, drugs and paranoia and he's a master at parodying the reality he belongs to.

Wild At Heart is a story of escapism, a road movie whose soundtrack swings from heavy metal, to Elvis, country music and jazz, on a voyage that starts in an anonymous small town in North Carolina, goes through Texas no-mans land and ends up in thriving New Orleans.

Music is a key element, the main means, besides love, to run away from a senseless reality.  One of my favourite scenes is the one in which Lula (Dern) and Sailor (Cage) stop in the middle of Texas wilderness and dance madly to the sound of heavy metal blasting out of the radio.

Wild at Heart is filled with symbols.  First of all there's fire.  The film starts with Sailor lighting a cigarette, and Lynch returns again and again to the mini explosion of a match igniting.  There are other images of fire used in the film including a car busting into flames.

Another reoccurring symbol is the colour red.  Lula, and the image of her own mum which is a sex doll with long ruby nails, lipstick tattooed on her lips and red shoes - like the slippers that protect Dorothy from the evil magic of the Wicked Witch of the East in the Wizard of Oz.

As in many other movies by Lynch, Freudian symbols are ubiquitous: the Wicked Witch is, as a matter of fact, Lula's mum (indeed Laura Dern's real-life mother is Diane Ladd), and when Sailor runs back to the love of his life after many misadventures - mainly provoked by Lula's evil mum - her picture fades away from the frame that Lula keeps on her coffee table.

The dialogue is built on a mixture of stereotypes of pop culture.  Lula talks of the build up in traffic and of the hole on the ozone layer - of guys and dolls movies - "The way your head works is God's own private mystery", Sailor says.  There is also 'fairytale language', for example when the Good Witch appears to Sailor she says: "If you're truly wild at heart you'll fight for your dreams"!  There is also comic strip jargon - when Sailor comes around after being beaten up by a gang, he apologises, "to you gentleman for referring to you as homosexuals..." (he had actually called them 'faggots') "... I also want to thank you fellows: you've taught me a valuable lesson in life...".

Lynch interweaves reality and imagination.  There are vision-like characters, which seem to belong to a parallel universe, like the Wicked Witch flying on her broomstick by Lula and Sailor's car in the desert.  Or a blind black woman making an apparition in a French restaurant in New Orleans, a premonition of a future that no one can foresee - because fortune is blind.

But there are other scenes when reality goes off the rails - the two lovers dance in a nightclub and when a guy grabs Lula, Sailor stops the band with a firm gesture of his hand; the singer throws the microphone to our hero and, with the heavy metal band, he starts singing an Elvis number, with the girls around him screaming like the fans at a Presley concert!

This film has a huge amount of smoking in it!  Sailor smoked his first cigarette at four, and his mum was already dead from lung cancer.  Lula asks him, "what brand did she smoke?".  "Marlboro, same as me", he answers.  There isn't a single scene without a cigarette being lit up.  One wonders, at times, if this isn't after all, a long Marlboro commercial!

Finally, Wild At Heart is a love story but in the end will love win out over everything and everybody?  The Good Witch tells Sailor, "Don't turn away from love".

Reviewed by Claudia Sandroni, Premier Movie Reviews 2006

Nicolas Cage

Laura Dern

Willem Dafoe

J.E. Freeman

Crispin Glover

Diane Ladd

Calvin Lockhart

Isabella Rossellini

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