In Twin Peaks, a “blue rose” case is one that’s grounded in the supernatural; in this fifteen-minute spot for Dior, Lady Blue Shanghai, the blue rose is a token of romance, and an accessory. Strange, what love does. It seems evident that Dior had approached Lynch and requested that he make them a commercial spot that worked “like a David Lynch film,” and then equally as evident that Dior had expected him to make one that resembled, say, Mulholland Drive.
Lady Blue Shangai looks most like Inland Empire, Lynch’s most divisive and least pretty film. (A gloomy daydream used to be called, in old-school slang, a “brown study.” Inland Empire — filmed, like Lady Blue Shanghai, on digital, and thus devoid of true black — might be Lynch’s brownest effort.) Like Inland Empire, it begins in “an old hotel.” Like Inland Empire and like many other Lynch films, it relies on the unnervingness of déjà vu, the horror of surveillance. Unlike Inland Empire, it tries to sell us something.
Marianne Cotillard — a businesswoman in an ultra-feminine grey suit by, who else, Dior — leaves a business meeting, and returns to her hotel room in Shanghai to find an old song playing where no song had previously been playing, and a Lady Dior handbag, glowing like a warning. Cotillard dials up the front-desk on the ever-present Lynchian telephone, and speaks a classic Lynchian line: “Someone is here, someone is in my room.” “It’s silly,” she tells the staff who turn up to investigate, “I felt I had been here before.” We know exactly how she feels.