David Lynch by Anne Jerslev

Author:Anne Jerslev
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030739249
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Lady Blue Shanghai

David Lynch has made one longer commercial, Lady Blue Shanghai. The film was commissioned for the luxury brand Dior to advertise their famous “Lady Dior” bag. The 15-minute commercial was launched on the Dior website in May 2010. The film is “presented by Dior” in the opening credits, but David Lynch was given a relatively free hand to make the film. Dior had just stipulated that three conditions were met. David Lynch has said: “They called me up and said, ‘Would you like to make a short film for the Internet? You can do anything you want, you just need to show the handbag, the Pearl Tower and some old Shanghai’” (Copping 2010; Todd 2012). Lynch agreed to make the commercial and said about the work that “[t]his falls between a regular film and a commercial. I liked that idea. There are adverts and people get hit hard, and then there is this, where it is like coming at it from a different angle” (Copping 2010). The rules set by the Dior company resulted in a narrative film, which refrained from showing the Dior logo, but showed the Oriental Pearl Tower, the Lady Dior bag, and the female protagonist and her lover running around in Old Shanghai and dancing in an old-fashioned room to tango music.

The film falls into three parts. A woman (played by Marion Cotillard)14 walks into her hotel in Shanghai, and as she comes to the door of her room, she hears music inside. The music comes from an old-fashioned gramophone, and as she turns it off, there is a flash of lightning that illuminates white smoke coming from a bag on the floor in the middle of the room. A couple of close-ups show the bag from which the light and smoke apparently emanate. The frightened woman walks to the telephone and calls hotel security with a characteristic Lynch sentence: “Someone is in my room.”15

In the second part of the film, the woman tells the hotel guards (reminiscent of Lynch’s many couples of deadpan or somewhat unintelligent policemen) about her feeling of “having been here before. In Shanghai. This feeling came upon me as I heard the pearls falling and hitting the jade”. There is a cut to an abstract, blurred image of glowing golden balls falling and bouncing on a green surface. The woman continues in an almost hypnotic voice (resembling the woman’s voice-over in Boat ) to recall: “It seemed as if suddenly I was in the Old Shanghai, saw dark alleys, narrow stairs, heard music.” When her voice-over stops, we see her enter an entirely red room and meet a man. They kiss and dance, after which they run through Old Shanghai streets and onto a balcony looking onto the river Huangpu and the Pearl Tower in the background. Apparently, he cannot be with her and they assure each other of their love. While they are looking over the river, a video clip of Cotillard with the Dior bag in her hand shows on a building and the bag breaks away from the image and floats towards them.

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