Stockholm Film Festival

Twin Peaks is a picturesque small town in the forest country in northern USA, close to the Canadian border. Peace is shattered by the unexpected and gruesome discovery of a body. On the shore close to the sawmill, the corpse of a murdered 17-year-old school girl is found, wrapped in plastic sheeting. This brutal murder shocks the townspeople, and when another young girl is attacked, Dale Cooper of the FBI is called in. The facade of respectability begings to crack up and the idyll proves to be a chimera. Just as in Blue Velvet, there are intrigues, jealousy, forbidden desires and hidden perversions beneath the surface. Lynch directed the introductory episodes of this television series, which has become something of a media event in the USA.

Comment:
In Twin Peaks, director David Lynch has achieved one of the most talked-about new TV series in the USA during 1990. With its highly unconventional dramaturgy and its dreamlike, freely associative plot, its pensive, almost provocatively laid-back tempo and its generous gallery of bizarre and complicated characters, it is head and shoulders above the general run of typecasting. Twin Peaks must have come, in equal measure, as a provocative and refreshing suprise.

And yet there is a great deal uniting Twin Peaks with other American marathon series based on a place name, all the way from series of the sixties like Peyton Place to present-day Dallas or Falcon Crest, in which an attempt is mae to expose structures of power and authority, using economic or erotic complications as a main strand of the plot.

At the bottom of it all there is also a riddle which has profoundly tragic consequences for those involved - the murder of a 17-year-old school girl. The riddle provides an excuse or a point of departure for Lynch and his co-creators to undertake - albeit in a slightly absurd form - a critical scrutiny of the mentality, values, prohibitions and laws governing the capitalist, petie-bourgeoisise, bigoted American body politic, of which Twin Peaks is a slightly distorted but, consequently, all the more distinct epitome.

The interpretative strength of the meanderings of this soap opera lies in its somewhat distancing perspective and its perceptive irony. And such is the musicality of the performance that the pauses are as effective and expressive as the outbursts, the confessions or the lies in words and pictures with which we are regaled. To this is added supremely talented array of actors who, with unmistakable gusto, impart contour and personality to all the peculiarities allotted to the cast.

David Lynch has signed the first and third episodes of Twin Peaks, which, so far, runs to eight episodes altogether (the 120 minutes pilot and seven parts of 50 minutes each) - though of course, a sequel already has been promised. But the narrative is unusually homogeneous. Those responsible for the other episodes have had the sense and skill to enlarge on and personalise the murky drama which Lynch has conjured forth.

SB

Medverkande

Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Ontkean, Piper Laurie

Producent

David J. Latt

Manus

David Lynch

Foto

Ron Garcia

Musik

Angelo Badalamenti

Talat språk

English

 

Andra filmer från sektionen Seminarium

Se alla festivalfilmer från 1990