In dreams you're mine all of the time (Blue Velvet: Re-release (DVD))

Name: hogsflesh

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Product:	Blue Velvet: Re-release (DVD)
Date:	17.07.05 (280 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great film

Disadvantages: Not so great DVD

Blue Velvet, released in 1986, was director David Lynch’s fourth film, and probably the one that cemented his reputation as weird but still commercial. While it’s not quite his best – Eraserhead is, and I love The Elephant Man – it’s certainly extraordinarily good, and has a far more logical and linear storyline than most of his work. It tells of the darkness that lurks behind the all-American small town façade, a theme expanded on to slightly less effect in the TV series Twin Peaks.

Wholesome college student Jeffrey (a very young and fresh-faced Kyle MacLachlan) is visiting his hometown while his dad’s in hospital. He finds a severed human ear near his home, which he dutifully hands over to the police. With the help of the case detective’s wholesome daughter Sandy (Laura Dern), he investigates and is drawn into the seedy and terrifying world of gangster Frank (Dennis Hopper). Frank loves nightclub singer Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini), and holds her husband and son hostage to coerce her into his extremely twisted sex games. Dorothy, a masochist, soon finds herself having an affair with no-longer-quite-so-wholesome Jeffrey, who is also falling in love with Sandy. The bizarre four-way love triangle (love quadrangle?) plays out against some satisfyingly weird and unpleasant criminal antics as Jeffrey struggles with his darker side.

This is a great film. The performances are almost perfect, particularly Kyle MacLachlan’s (although there’s a moment where he sits on his bed sobbing after a particularly rough night that isn’t completely convincing). Isabella Rossellini is appropriately strange, although she’s not a very good singer, and nowhere near as sexy as her mother was. Frank’s gang of followers are weird in the way that only David Lynch characters can be (particularly Jack Nance, a Lynch regular). Dean Stockwell has an unforgettable cameo as Ben, owner of the most unappealing brothel in cinema history. Dennis Hopper’s obviously the person everyone remembers, and he is spectacular. Frank is genuinely scary, one minute weeping over an old song, the next exploding into violence and profanity. Only Michael Gambon in The Cook The Thief etc. and Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast are as unsettling, but they’re obviously acting, albeit very well. You kind of get the feeling that Dennis Hopper was actually like that (although it’s always difficult to separate truth from myth where he’s concerned).

The film is shot beautifully, with the wholesome American town (white picket fences, red roses, men tending their lawns) looking particularly lovely in an insipidly cheerful kind of way. Lynch occasionally goes a little too far (the shot of unpleasant-looking insects struggling just under the grass of the perfect lawns is a bit too obvious), but no other director can make perfectly normal things like the human ear look so alien. There are plenty of trademark close-ups of mundane objects with heavy industrial noise in the background, and plenty of typical visual non sequiturs.

It’s not all style over substance; the film is a thriller and the suspense sequences are brilliant, real edge-of-the-seat stuff even if you’ve already seen it a few times. It has a great soundtrack by Angelo Badalamenti, which veers between skilful old Hollywood melodrama pastiche and his more typical Twin Peaks style. It also uses (obviously) the song Blue Velvet by Bobby Vinton to great effect, and In Dreams by Roy Orbison, discovering sinister meanings in them that only someone like Lynch could ever have noticed. Although set in the present day, the film evokes the 1950s as some kind of idyllic American dreamland while at the same time twisting it round by turning the decade’s innocent love songs into psycho-sexual nightmares (which makes Hopper particularly inspired casting, as he started out playing second fiddle to James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause).

Sadly, this DVD (it belongs to my flatmate) isn’t the best. The sound and picture quality could be a lot better (some of the darker scenes are pretty difficult to make out). It’s obviously an improvement on VHS, but really, it should be a hell of a lot better than it is. The only extra is a 45-minute interview with Dennis Hopper. This might well have been filmed for some kind of festival of his films, as the interviewer asks him about ten or so movies, but misses out a few of the obvious ones (Easy Rider, Apocalypse Now, Super Mario Bros). Only about ten minutes is devoted to Blue Velvet, so the DVD people obviously just grabbed whatever they could get the rights to and slapped it on the disc. Hopper’s memory is notoriously bad, and he seems to get his facts mixed up a few times. The cameraman for the interview seems to have been a rank amateur, and there’s quite a bit of background noise (you can hear a plane flying overhead at one point). Still, it’s better than nothing.

There’s also a pamphlet about the film, a badly-written and borderline pretentious analysis of its themes. The photos that illustrate it are of appalling quality, as is some of the actual text, and there’s a glaring typo in the first paragraph. The DVD also claims to have ‘Informative liner notes’, which I can only conclude must mean the blurb on the back of the box.

Blue Velvet is a fantastic film. I can’t think of any other film that so perfectly combines violence, deviant sex, voyeurism, old music and robins. Unfortunately, this DVD isn’t the best way to enjoy it. There’s a more recent two-disc edition that probably does the film justice. The only advantage with this edition is that it should at least be dirt cheap.

Summary: A must-see thriller/horror movie that could have done with a better DVD release.