Almost midway through watching Claire Denis’ Beau Travail, my mother asked me to help her cut her hair, which I did dutifully, not before inspecting the new linen on the carpet of our living room. The movie had put me in a reflective mood, and made me think about how much our lives can be like films. How our dialogue, curt and unintentional, can be molded into moments of clarity and intention. The artful take of me cutting her hair would be akin to the beautifully rendered images of Denis’ 1999 film, based loosely on a novella by Herman Melville.

In the film, sixteen officers are stationed in the arid, desolate landscape of Djibouti, rocky terrain surrounded by blue, clairvoyant water. A sergeant, Galoup, develops an obsession with another officer, Sentain, who is a young newly-arrived legionnaire. Galoup tries to stymie Sentain’s success to impress the commanding officer who takes an interest in Sentain but pays little attention to Galoup. In between the shots of hardened masculinity set against the impossible backdrop, there are delicate moments of feminine care work and domesticity among the men. (The men iron their uniforms; a man hangs up washed undergarments waving in the wind.)

The film begins and ends with dancing; in the beginning it takes place in the physical, consumable world, and in the end it is unclear whether it is in an afterlife, a dream or a vision. Denis prioritizes physicality above all else in Beau Travail, showing the sinews of soldiers’ muscles while they perform their daily exercises as she does women’s shapely forms while dancing. She feminizes and elegizes the men in long takes of their faces, with an opera-like soundtrack in the background. She establishes and undermines the idea of empire, French colonial power, that is set up to malign a country’s inhabitants.

When Galoup first sees Sentain, he describes him as thin and not fitting of being an officer. “I felt something vague and menacing take hold of me,” he says. On the other hand, he admires his commandant “without knowing why,” and admits the man never confided in him or cared about him. Galoup says he feels a rage brimming inside him, a jealousy that cannot be contained. Later on, when the commander asks Sentain if he gets along with his parents, he reveals that he was found in a staircase. The commander responds that at least it’s a ‘belle trouvée,” a parallel with “beau travail.”

The film is an exercise in labour, or its equivalent in yearning, whether it is for a dance, for a man, or for home. The camp is set up in an arid plateau with children and their parents watching. It seems as though there is no need for it, and its reason for existing does not come into the picture. Yet there is a particular need, or want, in each hoist of the body, each swim, each thrust of the arm. In the end, the tragic fate of Sentain is caused by an overreaction, another brimming of rage, by Galoup, who knocks a canteen of water out of his hands while Sentain tries to aid a fellow soldier. The soldier is being punished for abandoning his post, resigned to digging in the hard, rocky ground, a hole of unknown depth.

Beau Travail begins with the writing of a memoir, a hapless if not overused device, to describe events in the past tense, from a point of view that is already withered, less accurate and reliable. Movies that begin with the act of remembering include Persepolis (2007), a coming of age story of a girl in the midst of the Iranian revolution, and An Education (2009), the memoir of a girl who is seduced by an older man, and Forrest Gump (1994), in whose recollection there lie many hilarious outtakes and revivals of pop culture. Denis’ film, with its wistful logic, makes for Sunday night viewing, a night balanced on the edge of morning, in the dance halls of someone’s basement or in the mind’s eye.

“I just wanted to come here,” says the man in the “Diner Scene” of Mulholland Drive, if you look it up on YouTube. “Winkie’s?” says another man incredulously. So begins a great film sequence in one of David Lynch’s most storied films.

This summer, I liked a playlist of the movie’s soundtrack on Spotify and played the track by Angelo Badalamenti on loop as I made my daily suburban walk, along a main street, through a small meadow with a tennis court I looked at each day, and through a trail beside a neighbourhood called Creditpointe, with an ‘e’ at the end feminizing it aptly and uncannily. The soundtrack’s slinky irony made for satisfying listening, even if somewhat unsettling. But that was the goal, anyway.

The Diner Scene, with its abrupt and lonesome scare, is one of several well-known scenes laden with hints, signs, symbols and references to be sifted through and analyzed by moviewatchers and Lynch fanatics. Mulholland Dr., stylized as such, is one of the greatest films to be made — the greatest, according to a BBC poll of film critics in 2016, followed by Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love in second place, and trailed by Richard Linklater’s Boyhood in fifth.

“Every element in cinema is important, and music is one element, and I always say that the music has to marry to the picture,” says Lynch in conversation with David Stratton, in Australia in 2015. Indeed, the soundtrack to Mulholland Dr. is as varied and piecemeal as the film itself, at times jingly and sombre, by turns ironic and operatic. The film reads as many dreams stitched together, forming a linear-like progression of merry and miserable scenes that lock out the real in favour of the plausible, not altogether impossible.

“It’s a mysterious road,” Lynch says of Mulholland Drive, particularly at night. It has views of the Hollywood Hills just as it has ahead of it a long, winding path. Naomi Watts, who stars as Betty, has said of it, “Mulholland Drive was a particular road that I remember when I was down, down, down on my luck, and remember thinking, this day is going too bad and this has been a succession of really bad days. I could just do a quick turn and just drive off this cliff. But there are times you could drive around and it’s a smooth ride, and it’s the opposite of that.”

The many interpretations of the film seem to converge on one likelihood, which is that Betty Elms is the dream version of Diane Selwyn, and encounters in her dream Rita — who in “real life” is Camilla Rhodes — a lover and alter ego who suffers from amnesia after a car accident. The two encounter other characters in the course of auditioning for a part (Betty), searching for her identity (Rita), and attending a performance at a late night club and a dinner party late in the movie (both). The film is said to explore stardom and putrefication, a “love story in the city of dreams,” as Lynch himself has characterized it.

The film doesn’t lack for comedic moments, alongside the bizarre, like the infamous “cowboy scene,” in which a director for a big name studio, Adam Kesher, is interrogated by a dreamlike character who instructs him to cast the woman in the photograph he was shown earlier in the day. “You will see me one more time if you do good. You will see me two more times if you do bad.” In another scene, Kesher pours pink paint over his lover’s jewellery box after catching her in bed with another man.

When I watch Mulholland Dr., a sense of uncanny washes over me, and whatever delights the movie brings also washes a sense of dread and abject terror. Why are we drawn to such imagery, and what can be the comfort in sharing such a dream? The film is not moralistic, or does not seem to impart a lesson, but the fate of Diane Selwyn leaves the viewer confused as to why reality is as harsh as it is, and why sheer ambition should give way to such strife. The film seems as if it shouldn’t be as elegaic as it is, nor as funny or crude, but it is. It is a film with a long, winding arch and many characters who are cast and recast in strange acts and are not, ultimately, understood.