WILD AT HEART

WILD AT HEART is David Lynch’s lovers-on-the-run nightmare, a road movie where romance keeps crashing into sex, violence, bad mothers, hired killers and rotten American mythology. Nicolas Cage plays Sailor Ripley, an ex-con in a snakeskin jacket with Elvis in his hips. Laura Dern plays Lula Fortune, his lover, accomplice and the emotional centre of the film.

Lynch takes the basic shape of a fugitive romance and overloads it with grotesque comedy, sudden brutality, THE WIZARD OF OZ, rock’n’roll fantasy and Southern Gothic excess. It’s romantic one minute, ugly the next, then ridiculous, then frightening. Cage and Dern commit completely. Half-measures would’ve killed it.

The Cannes reaction became part of the film’s history. WILD AT HEART screened to wild applause, but the Palme d’Or decision turned the room against itself. When Bertolucci announced Lynch as the winner, cheers and boos competed in the same room. Some critics saw the film as vulgar, violent and self-indulgent. Others saw a major American filmmaker pushing romance and pulp cinema until both started to mutate.

Lynch accepted the chaos with typical calm. He later called Cannes “the best film festival in the universe,” which feels about right for a festival that rewarded him and heckled him in the same breath. WILD AT HEART remains one of the great Cannes provocations: too loud, too horny, too violent, too sincere, and somehow still impossible to dismiss.