Inland Empire

We've had David Lynch's move Inland Empire out from Netflix for a month, and finally started watching it last Saturday when we had our friends Michael and Lesley over for dinner. We made it through about an hour and a half of it at that sitting, and then I watched the remaining almost hour and a half later this week, albeit without my full attention. If I didn't know that the movie had been made by David Lynch, I might have taken the movie for the work of a younger auteur who wanted to construct an hommage to Tarkovsky and Sukorov (and probably Bela Tarr, but I have to admit I've never seen a Bela Tarr movie) and Lynch all at once. It's not just the fact that half the movie is made in Polish and apparently in Poland, it's the languorous shots, the use of shadows, and even one shot that looked like a direct reference to the fantastic scene in Tarkovsky's Nostalghia where the camera traverses a mini-landscape that appears to be located entirely inside a building.