American filmmaker David Lynch's "Lost Highway," with screenplay written with Barry Gifford, is a deliberately disorienting film about life, death, sex-and film. Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth's no less willfully disorienting multimedia opera "Lost Highway" is about life, death, sex, film-and music. The composer and librettist's 2003 work, with co-librettist Elfriede Jelinek, reached this country this month in a co-production by the Contemporary Music Division of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music at Oberlin College, in Ohio, and the Miller Theatre at Columbia University. "Lost Highway" opened at Oberlin early in the month and at the Miller on February 23, with a second performance slated for the 24th. The New York airings were completely sold out.

Set in Los Angeles, "Lost Highway" tells the story of jazz musician Fred Madison-or, maybe, the younger auto wiz and mechanic Pete Dayton-and his brunette wife Renée-or is she a blonde named Alice? One figure in their lives is thuggish mobster Mr. Eddy-or Dick Laurent. Another is the eerie, pasty-faced mystery man in black, who seems to have supernatural powers and some kind of bond with Mr. Eddy/Dick. Alienation, sex, murder and violence play major parts in this strange journey.

Michael Weyandt (Pete) and Raphael Sacks (Mr. Eddy)

The opera "Lost Highway" encompasses electronic and recorded sounds; speech, song both mellifluous and angular, and Sprechstimme; resounding moans and groans; orchestral dissonance and clangorous percussion; and live acting and video. Fred and, but for one key phrase, Renée speak. Pete and Alice sing. In her score, Neuwirth traverses a history of the lyric art, covering everything from early music to very contemporary classical music, with pauses at Kurt Weill and the blues. There are assaults by the sounds and lights of the highway, a fragment of which also frames part of the stage. When an unseen prison door slams, we not only hear it, we also feel it shake the seats we're sitting in. Walls have an off-kilter, German Expressionist tilt and also function as video screens. The opera is faithful to the film, but, unlike some musical works inspired by films, succeeds in enhancing it. The opera is no longer than the film and short, cinematic scenes predominate. Timothy Weiss was the music director, Jonathon Field the stage director, Barry Steele the video and lighting designer, and Scott Dane Knowles and Giovanni Campo the set designers.

The marriage of Fred (Barry Bryan)--a saxophonist in the movie, a trumpeter, like Neuwirth, in the opera-and Renée (Alice Teyssier) is in trouble and someone-the mystery man? (mesmerizing Chad Grossman)-is videotaping their most intimate moments and wants them to know it. The final tape finds Fred killing Renée and, in short order, he gets arrested, tried and sentenced to die in the electric chair, all of which leaves him, understandably, with a pounding headache. Clueless guards (Ian Rhodewalt, Jesse Garrison, William Thurlow) and detectives (Jon Levin, Paul Gibson) surround the leading characters here and one morning, the guardians of death row are mystified to find Fred missing and Pete Dayton (ingratiating light-timbred coloratura baritone Michael Weyandt) in his place. Pete, the son of swinger/biker parents Candace and Bill (Ami Vice and Timothy McCormack), cannot fathom how he got there, but he does share Fred's malady-his first words, sung to a florid motif, are, "My head hurts."

Released from prison, Pete returns to work at the service station, where his star client is the creepy, hot-tempered Mr. Eddy (Raphael Sacks), gruff, sputtering, wheezing, and given to falsetto and jerky, mechanical puppet-like movements here, not as suave as his no less intimidating movie counterpart. Bearing the brunt of Mr. Eddy's sudden ire here is a cigarette smoker, rather than the film's tail-gaiter. The mobster's mistress, whom he guards jealously, is blonde Alice (fine lyric soprano Teyssier again), a Marilyn Monroe/Madonna type, who enters to sleazy, jazzy strains and joins Pete in some ornate coloratura as they engage in truly sultry and sensual mutual seduction scenes, at the service station and at seedy motels.

Barry Bryan is Fred and Chad Grossman is the Mystery Man

More melismatic phrases, of the Purcell via Britten variety, come from countertenors Grossman and Samuel Read Levine-that treble sound again--as well as from Pete and Alice, as Alice explains how she became involved with Mr. Eddy and in making porn flicks, events we see projected on the scrim. The engine of Pete and Alice's escape together from Mr. Eddy's wrath will be party boy Andy (Levine), who figures into both Renée's and Alice's lives-each sings that she "met him at a place called Moke's"-and whose zombie-like, white-masked party guests mirror the pale face of the mystery man, a voyeur who seems to be everywhere-simultaneously next to Fred at a party and answering the phone in Fred's home, in Fred's bed in his nightmare--like an omniscient filmmaker.

Alice seduces Andy, Pete kills him, and they rob him. Dangerous Alice, who turns a pistol on Pete before turning it over to him to protect them, knows a fence for the loot they've collected at Andy's place. He turns out to be none other than the mystery man. Alice tells Pete, in a dramatic coloratura phrase, "You will never have me," and he morphs (back) into Fred, who slits Mr. Eddy's throat as the mystery man watches, camera in hand, which he even turns on us, the audience! Moaning and groaning, his head splitting, Fred, center stage, drives down the lost highway for the last time, his counterpart, Pete, at stage left, sharing his pain.

Commenting on the connection between the opera and film in a program note, production assistant Yi Hong Sim writes, "For those of you who have not seen David Lynch's 'Lost Highway,' the completion of this psychological journey awaits you when you do. For those of you who have, tonight already happened. Or has it? Only you will know, and tonight you will find out ... remember, Neuwirth once said: 'I want to open petrified brains.'" My partner and I saw the film the previous weekend. When we experienced the opera this weekend, it was like déja vu-only more so.

Tickets for "Lost Highway" sold for $35, $21 for students, via 212/854-7799 and www.millertheatre.com. The Miller Theatre is located at 116th Street and Broadway and was, in an earlier incarnation, site of the world premieres of Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden's operetta "Paul Bunyan" and Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein's opera about Susan B. Anthony, "The Mother of Us All."