Wild at Heart
Different (film) genres hold few secrets for David Lynch. Ask him to make a whodunnit and you get the TV series Twin Peaks, a coming-of-age story becomes Blue Velvet in his hands. But he can also get away with the road movie, as he showed in Wild at Heart, a film adaptation of Barry Gifford's novel of the same name. But whatever genre, the bizarre Lynchian touch is unmistakably present everywhere. This road movie/thriller earned him the Golden Palm at Cannes.
Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) has just been paroled from prison, somewhere in North Carolina. His sweetheart Lula Fortune (Laura Dern) is waiting for him and soon the two decide to flee to California. This much to the dismay of Lula's mother Marietta (Diane Ladd), who dislikes Sailor horribly. She not only sends a private investigator after the two, but also a hitman to kill Sailor. Meeting criminal Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe) along the way does not make things any better.
