Nothing much really happens in this fifteen-minute short by David Lynch. Yet I couldn't take my eyes off the nothing much.Another reviewer claims this is a dull movie but a fine commercial. If I hadn't been told it was a commercial for Lady Dior or Luis Vuitton or Sigfried Sassoon or Max Factor, I wouldn't have known.Yes, the bespoke handbag features prominently in the film, but not TOO prominently, and it functions in the film as a link between a phantasmagorical past love and the present circumstances of the curiously boffo Marion Cotillard. She enters her hotel room, a tango from the 1920s playing on the radio, and finds this glittering handbag on the floor of her room Shanghai and two Chinese house detectives appear and ask her about it. Then they stand motionless, speechless, while she spins out this tale of experiencing deja vu at lunch. The story involves her and a lover escaping a room in 1920s Shanghai and landing on a rooftop, at which point the lover says he can't be with her and fades away while handing her a blue flower.Back to the present. Under the eyes of the two statuesque investigators, she finally opens the bag. Guess what's in it.

Just the idea, the concept of having Lynch do commercial work sounded interesting enough for me to see the film. It was a bad decision. The film is awful and bears nothing Lynch-like to it. It feels like a 15-year-old is trying to do his vision of what Lynch is and fails at making even a recognizable copy. The fact that the whole thing is a commercial and that the ubiquitous Dior with its bags stings your eyes is actually far from being the worst problem of this film. The plot is so contrived. The acting is terrible, the whole thing is edited like a student film, and hits on so many clichés one must try to justify Lynch by saying he actually made fun of them while taking their money. All is there: silly flashbacks, slow-motion disappearance of a lover as the endless love-yous are being uttered, cheesy Instagram-like sequences of blurry images... I just couldn't believe my eyes, really.

Let's get it straight first off: I am a big fan of Lynch's and I know that this is supposed to be a long ad.But that does not stop me from thinking that this short film is a ludicrous effort that only serves the purpose of reminding the viewer how great Lynch used to be, at least up to Mulholland Dr., which is now more than ten years ago! Everything, maybe except for the music, is wrong in this short. As usual the plot makes no sense at all, which could be bearable in itself, but no atmosphere is built out of the plot less story either, so the fact that there is no or little story does become a problem. Second, the Chinese actors are terrible, they are so bad that it looks like Lynch cast the first two guys he saw walking down the street. On we go. The bag as mysterious, symptomatic object (see blue box from Mulholland Dr.) is used in a ridiculous way, both when it is seen in the hotel room and on the billboard. Cotillard tries hard but there is little to do with a character that has to deliver useless "I love you" lines to a random Chinese guy waving a blue napkin (or was it a rose).Finally a word on the digital video cameras. I already disliked Inland Empire because it used them. I think Lynch should abandon this idea and go back to a more traditional technique. The sexiness of movies such as Mulholland and Lost Highway was also due to the fantastic way they were photographed. We do not need the shakiness and the low resolution of Inland Empire and of this short, they just don't add anything while they take away a lot.Now, Mr Lynch, please go back to make feature films and return to your old standards, we are tired of pointless digital video shorts.

Apparently, and maybe I'm thick-in-the-head, this David Lynch short film is a commercial for Lady Dior, which is basically a really fancy handbag. This isn't a surprise that Lynch would make a commercial - he has made several over the years, maybe as a means to get some of his ideas out there into the cinematic medium, and maybe, perhaps, to get some quick money. But this is a little different: this is a 16 minute film where it's really about a woman who goes to a hotel, a record is playing mysteriously in her room, and a handbag shines very brightly. She calls the hotel-help asking what is going on, and then tells a story of meeting a man before... or thinking she's met a man before, in Shanghai. The power of this short film is that a) I didn't have any real clue that it was a long-form commercial while watching it, and b) it carries the kind of unique mystery that Lynch unlocks with his approach to cinema - the cinematography (in this case digital video, with a more sophisticated eye than the experimentation of Inland Empire), the editing that emphasizes the human face and the enigmatic movement of characters in the frame, sound editing that is not-of-this world. I still am not quite sure what it's all about, or if it's really what it is in that handbag (I'm more-so reminded of the elusive nature of the blue box from Mulholland Drive), and I almost don't want to know, at least not until two or three more viewings. It also is a big asset that Cotillard, stunning in appearance and her quiet intensity, works so well here for him as his female-muse. Does it mean as much as his other short films? I'm still not sure about that either. Compared to some of the works on his Short Films of David Lynch or Best of DavidLynch.com DVDs, its not any kind of absurd thing he's dealing with here. It's like a splintered-in-his-mind romantic drama where love and loss and memory and not knowing converge into something one can look at and maybe recognize, or just feel. It's sublime work by a master of his self-made craft.