Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern fall in love in Sailor et Lula, the most sulphurous of the late David Lynch's films. A kitsch, violent and terribly pessimistic road movie.
In 1990, David Lynch opened the decade with two major works: his series Twin Peakswhich we no longer present, but also the film Sailor et Lulaor Wild at Heart in original version, adapted from the novel by Barry Gifford, which notably received the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Like the majority of the filmmaker's films, over the years it has become a must-see, but not for the same reasons as Mulholland Drive or Lost Highway.
With Sailor et LulaDavid Lynch does not offer the viewer a convoluted story, subliminal images and enigmatic plans which still generate theories, each more outlandish than the last, years later. Here, it is first and foremost a question of love. Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern play a crazy couple, young passionate lovers, but consumed by a dirty world and a deviant society.
Kitsch as you wish, excessive, grotesque, and even parodic, Sailor et Lula is a strange work littered with mind-blowing, hallucinatory and musical sequences that give the impression that Lynch is mocking his two main characters to reveal the naivety of their ambition, that of being a perfectly normal couple in a perfectly abnormal society.
Bonnie and Clyde, or almost
David Lynch will close the 1990s with a second “road film”, A true storye. He therefore inaugurates this decade with a first road movie, at a precise moment when this genre is losing momentum. After the 70s and the great classics of the genre, like Easy Rider de Dennis Hopper et Zero limit point by Richard C. Sarafian, who participated in the very development of the road movie, the genre ran out of steam in the 1980s.
Political and anti-establishment, the road movie was in the 1970s the emblem of a marginalized generation, of a counterculture, a direct response to traumatic events like the Vietnam War. In the 1980s, road movies seemed to have lost this feeling of rebellion, but the following decade set the record straight and Thelma et Louise, True Romance et Born killers have arrived.
No more exploring the American landscape, taking drugs on the road and talking with hippies, 1990s road movies seem much more violent and pessimisticlike Sailor et Lula. Here, the duo does not take the road on their own to venture into unknown territory in search of new sensations or to escape deep boredom.
Sailor Ripley and Lula Pace Fortune are a couple on the run, like the famous criminal duo featured in Bonnie and Clyde by Arthur Penn released in 1967, another founder of the road movie genre. If Bonnie and Clyde are the most emblematic representatives of the couple on the run and Lynch was necessarily inspired by them, Sailor and Lula are on the run, but are not criminals.
They get behind the wheel under duress to escape Lula's motherMarietta, a dangerous woman who opposes their union and who is responsible for Sailor's first stint in prison, locked up for having killed one of step-mom's henchmen. Once Sailor is freed, he and Lula flee, quickly understanding that Marietta will not give up.
It is to escape the violence that the couple sets off on the road; moving away is their way of living their love and staying alive. Their motivations are neither protesting nor murderousquite the contrary.
We live in a society
Forced to flee, they find themselves forcibly marginalized and encounter other outcasts along the wayothers excluded from society, like Bobby Peru. The character played by Willem Dafoe is very disturbing. Vicious, ugly, disgusting, he goes so far as to sexually assault Lula in Big Tuna, the typically Texan imaginary town populated by rednecks where the couple stops at a motel.
Lula has a very violent past, flashbacks suggest that she was raped as a child, and a completely toxic mother, played by her own mother, the actress Diane Ladd. In the past or in the present, Sailor and Lula are confronted with dangerous characters and immersed in violencea violence that they never provoke, but which is imposed on them.
These encounters only prove that the two main characters are not misfits. Non-violent, they stand out in this setting unhealthy. Sailor and Lula only want one thing, to love each other openly, to settle down and form a family. In this sense, they perpetuate a conservative vision of family life and wish to reproduce a pattern established by the society we know, but impossible in the context of the film.
-The society depicted in Sailor et Lula is so tainted that their project seems incongruous, if not totally unrealistic. Like many road movies, Sailor et Lula draw up a observation of his time. What emerges is a darkness, a very pessimistic idea of the world. When it all seems too late, they are the latest incarnation of traditional valuesthe ghosts of another era. Perhaps only a traditional couple, deeply in love, can succeed in escaping this sad conception of the world.
Perfectly Kitsch
And Sailor et Lula is above all a love story, at least that's how Lynch describes his film, the filmmaker was obviously not satisfied with a classic staging. To talk about the couple, society and marginality, Lynch could not stage a romantic comedy, he needed perversity, pessimism, but also and above all, a lot of sensuality.
Four years later Blue VelvetLynch confirms his obsession with the representation of eroticism. If the sex scenes between Sailor and Lula are very graphic, they especially exude sensuality. The film addresses love through intimacy. As usual, Lynch leaves his mark with striking sequences such as the musical sequence in the nightclub where, after going wild on metal, Sailor begins to sing Love Me from Elvis Presley to Lula. For a moment, time seems to have frozen and women are screaming in the background, as if Sailor had really become Elvis, a figure synonymous with excess that sticks to her throughout the film.
And this from sound design to ghostly and surreal apparitions, like that of Sheryl Lee in Good Witch from Wizard of Oz who encourages him at the end of the film not to give up his love for Lula. Despite very disturbing sequenceslike the one where Grace Zabriskie attacks poor Johnnie (Harry Dean Stanton), Lynch does not make his film a puzzle as he has done with other works.
Scenes shock, surprise, transgress, but also mark by their ridiculousness, obviously sought after and fully assumed. Such obsessed with each other, the two characters become ridiculous. From their language tics to their very overplayed bodily expressions, the characters sometimes seem to come straight out of a parody work.
In Sailor et Lulaabsolutely everything is outrageous. As with a musical, the spectator must agree to witness an offbeat, non-realistic, even crude work in this case, in order to immerse himself in Lynch's proposal, far from being conventional. It is especially the sequences where Nicolas Cage sings passionately or those where the two characters seem completely ravaged by love, which tip the film into parody.
Different from the other characters, not adapted to the world in which they live, they seem perfectly kitsch. Sailor and Lula are constantly out of step, they stand out, they seem to come from another era.
Faced with the monstrous characters encountered on their path, Sailor and Lula seem sane, but above all naive. By making them look ridiculous, by making them look like idiots in love, by mocking their obsession, the filmmaker revealed their absurdity. Sailor and Lula are false rebels, false outcasts with traditional thoughts condemned to live in a twisted world.
Gross, parodic, outrageous, Sailor et Lula ultimately addresses much more serious subjects than he might let on. Lynch comments on a sick society, full of dangerous misfits, but does not put his two main characters on a pedestal. Sailor and Lula are idealists far too naive to survive in a world like the one portrayed by Lynch. In this sense, we could consider that the proposed happy ending participates in the parody.
Road movie heroes who dream of love, marriage and family, there will be several in the 1990s. True RomanceClarence and Alabama, who are in love with each other, get married very quickly and want to have children and in Born killersMallory and Mickey get married “on the run” and the final shot suggests that they have managed to start a family.
In this sense, the two films can be considered as heirs of Sailor et Lulaeven if Born killers especially will go much further in the representation of violence by making its two main characters real killers.
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