“The world is wild at heart and weird on top,” says Lula, who might have been describing David Lynch's aesthetic. Lynch, in adapting Barry Gifford's novel, Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lula, brings much more of the wildness to the fore, and much of the weirdness serves his own preoccupations. Nevertheless Gifford has called him “my ideal cinematic translator...just as amazed by the world as I am.”* Wild at Heart tells of the young lovers, Lula and Sailor, on the lam across the Deep South-running from nightmare America, with its sniffing-dog media (no matter that the barrage has nothing to do with them); hounded by the crimes and sins of their elders, which are in their genes. Their love is sweet and dirty; it's everything, but it's not enough. This is Bonnie and Clyde without the shinola (but with lots of the other stuff), Gun Crazy without guns-telling us more about the strange passion between Peggy Cummins and John Dall in that film than the fifties ever could. As such, it is a fitting opener to Barry Gifford's Unforgettable Films. Winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes.

*in a Craig Seligman interview for the Examiner