Word: noir
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Daulne, 32, has a sad, splintery voice and an emotional clock that seems permanently set at midnight. Her background singers, harmonizing, chanting, even bleating, provide her with a vocal backdrop that's by turns naturalistic and a little coy. One song, the jazzy Nostalgie Amoureuse, feels like vocal film noir--shadowy and mysterious until, toward the end, Daulne's voice emerges from the mix with bruised passion. Other songs, like African Sunset, draw deftly on the upbeat music of South Africa's townships. But the best song is Daulne's seductive cover of Phoebe Snow's Poetry Man; that song...
...through the streets like the blood of a great snarling beast, unimpeded by his concerns. He was just one more fool in its hard history who'd gotten in over his head." Good magenta stuff, requiring only a little Hammond-organ ominoso to sound like the musings of Guy Noir, Garrison Keillor's private eye, who works "on the 12th floor of the Acme Building, in a city that knows how to keep its secrets...
...reviewer emerged from an early screening of Lost Highway with the cry of "Garbage!" Well, David Lynch must be doing something right. The creator of Twin Peaks describes his first film in four years as a "21st century noir horror film." It has a battered suitcase of references to old Hollywood film noir, the requisite gore for a scare show and, in the spooky presence of Robert Blake--with his pancake white face, shaved eyebrows and sickly smile--an eldritch harbinger of death like the dwarf in Twin Peaks. So whatever that critic may think, Lost Highway isn't refuse...
...visited this planet before, become familiar with its obsessions and grotesqueries until they hold as little terror as garden gnomes. And while it's always a tonic in this timid film age to see directors try something different, Lost Highway is the same different. Someone should tell Lynch that noir is a genre, but weird...
Headlines that once read "Celtic Pride" now read "Celtics Continue Slide" or the more tragic, "Celtic Dies." But not even dark humor can redeem Boston's embarrassing season. This is no film noir. It's a horror show...