Isabella Rossellini will be in Bologna tomorrow, Sunday, June 21, for the 40th edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato. The actress and director will meet the audience at 5:15 p.m. at Cinema Modernissimo, in a conversation with Gian Luca Farinelli, Director of the Cineteca di Bologna. Later that evening, at 9:45 p.m. in Piazza Maggiore, she will introduce Wild at Heart, David Lynch’s 1990 film in which she gave an unforgettable performance as Perdita Durango, presented in a new restoration by Universal Pictures and The Criterion Collection.

“David Lynch’s furious destruction and reinvention of the road movie begins with a lit match,” wrote Roy Menarini. “In other words, with cinema itself in its most elemental and dangerous form: a light flaring up in the darkness – which, as anyone who loves this art knows, is also the threat of a fire. Sailor, wearing his snakeskin jacket (‘a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom’), has just been released from prison and returns to Lula, who awaits him as one awaits a rock ’n’ roll apparition: not a man, but an Elvis song made flesh.

Wild at Heart is exactly this from the outset: a revolutionary melodrama set within the America of motels, gas stations and nightclubs. It also inhabits a childlike and terrifying imaginary world, where absolute love can still exist only because everything around it is grotesque, corrupt and monstrous.
Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1990, booed by many on the Croisette and received as a scandalous, unruly object, the film remains one of the clearest expressions of Lynch’s artistic vision. Coming after Blue Velvet and the first season of Twin Peaks, it seems to bring to the surface the more carnal, even more overtly pop dimensions of his cinema.

If, in Lynch’s work, horror often emerges from beneath the surface of the American dream, here that surface has already exploded. What remains are fragments of fairy tale, pornography, distorted comedy, musicals infused with heavy metal, horror and splatter. Yet amidst all of this, thanks in no small part to the blood-stained innocence of Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern, Sailor and Lula resemble two lost children who learned the language of adults far too early.

And then there is Isabella Rossellini, in the role of Perdita Durango: a brief yet magnetic presence. Following Dorothy Vallens in Blue Velvet, she embodies another wounded and seductive creature, blending noir with a strange, tropical melancholy.

For all these reasons, the film’s recurring references to The Wizard of Oz are far more than decorative quotations, especially given Lynch’s longstanding aversion to postmodern and cinephile allusion for its own sake. Despite its extreme violence, Wild at Heart may well be the most hopeful of Lynch’s films. When Sailor sings Love Me Tender to Lula, the kitsch does nothing to diminish the emotion. Quite the opposite. It is a genuine miracle.”