LOST HIGHWAY

USA 1997 - DCP - 134 minutes, in English

Director: David Lynch

Screenplay: David Lynch, Barry Gifford

Producers: Deepak Nayar, Tom Sternberg, Mary Sweeney

Cast: Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, John Roselius

Print Courtesy: Janus Films

“Lynchian” instantly conjured David Lynch’s brand of cinematic vision as soon as people had seen his earliest features, ERASERHEAD, ELEPHANT MAN and BLUE VELVET. LOST HIGHWAY, his seventh (1997) feature, travels down a twisting road of perverse menace as a jazz saxophonist (Bill Pullman) and his wife (Patricia Arquette) begin receiving disturbing VHS tapes—leading to jealousy, murder, and a startling mid-act transformation that radically changes everything that came before it. Berserk violence, scrambled identities, Angelo Badalamenti’s thunderous industrial soundtrack, and one of cinema’s most memorable mystery men: Lynch swirls it all into a screeching psychological manifestation of guilt, trauma, and denial that ranks among his most potent cinematic nightmares. This is a new 4K digital restoration. —Ken Eisen

Adoption

Hungary 1975 - DCP - 86 minutes, in Hungarian with English subtitles

Director: Márta Mészáros

Screenplay: Márta Mészáros, Gyula Hernádi, Ferenc Grunwalsky

Producer: Miklós Köllő

Cast: Katalin Berek, Gyöngyvér Vigh, Péter Fried

Print Courtesy: Janus Films

Wednesday, July 13 3:15 P.M. | RR2

Saturday, July 16 3:00 P.M. | RR3

What discoveries—or, for those too few who had the immense pleasure of seeing them when the director originally made them from 1968-1990, what rediscoveries—the films of trailblazing auteur Márta Mészáros (the first Hungarian woman to direct a feature film) are! And ADOPTION may very well be her best. Giving aching expression to the experiences of women in 1970s Hungary in this sensitive and absorbing slice-of-life drama, ADOPTION became the first film directed by a woman to win the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Through intensely intimate camerawork, stunningly shot in black-and-white, Mészáros immerses the viewer in the worlds of two women, each searching for fulfillment: Kata, a middle-aged factory worker who wishes to have a child with her married lover, and Anna, a teenage ward of the state determined to emancipate herself in order to marry her boyfriend. The bond that forms between the two speaks quietly but powerfully to the social and political forces that shape women’s lives as each navigates the realities of love, marriage, and motherhood in her quest for self-determination.

—Ken Eisen

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