There is a (possibly apocryphal) story that a French conference convened to discuss the films of Peter Greenaway once spent the three days never getting past the title of The Draughtsman's Contract. The French take their cinema very seriously. In this book (translated from the French) author Chion mentions a raging debate about his idol David Lynch's feature debut Eraserhead, and the question of what exactly is being erased. It's typical of the text.

Ostensibly pretty straightforward, David Lynch is a curious book. The first two-thirds dissect the man's films and TV (although sensibly either doesn't mention or brushes over On The Air, American Chronicles, and the execrable Hotel Room) in chronological order; the last part is given to the Lynch-Kit, a sort of subjective dictionary of Lynchian imagery and idea (from Alphabet to Word).

Chion, a Cahiers du Cinema critic, lecturer and film-maker, maintains a rigorous critical voice throughout but never at the expense of the personal. As a consequence, although the text sometimes reads like one of Sight & Sound's more bloated, head-scratching post-modernist deconstructions, it is both successfully enthusiastic and irreverent. (The exclamation mark key gets some serious action.)

One of the main critical planks (surely self-contradictory) is that Lynch is a film-maker whose oeuvre can only be taken a film at a time, and indeed, there is no continuing fanbase, work to work. An odd assertion given Lynch's pre-eminent position in the annals of cult-dom. Not that Chion elsewhere is entirely free of the bizarre. The book is littered with tantalising mini-facts. Did you realise, for example, that George Lucas approached him on the back of The Elephant Man to direct Return of the Jedi? That for a time he worked on adapting Thomas Harris superior psycho-thriller Red Dragon to the screen? Or that several minutes were cut (and lost) from the original print of Eraserhead?

Useful all. But then Chion follows up on these with the most eccentric and erratic of errors. Jedi, he tells us, was eventually made by Christian (not the late Richard) Marquand. He refers to Harris' book as Manhunter (Michael Mann's film version). He offers, intriguingly, the idea that Diane in Twin Peaks (the woman Agent Cooper incessantly speaks to through a tape-machine) may not even exist, and then consistently refers to her as Diana. Julie Cruise's 'Mysteries of Love' acquires an extra 'Sweet'. On and on. You do start to wonder if it's actually deliberate.

The author clearly has something of an affection for 1984's ill-fated Dune, and is oddly more prepared to defend that (or the badly flawed Wild At Heart) than celebrate Lynch's masterpiece, Blue Velvet. Any simple comparison shows the Herbert adaptation has not travelled a tenth as well. Still, Chion's defence of this swollen, rather turgid SF is more enjoyable than struggling through the film. "For me," he quotes Lynch, "film is a very strong desire to marry images and sounds. When I achieve this, I get a real thrill. In fact, I'm not sure I'm looking for anything more than just that thrill." Even the director as good as disowns the picture.

Strange too what Chion chooses to ignore. He simply dismisses the carefully layered allusions in Twin Peaks in a line, and later brings up the supposed influence of Kafka on Lynch's work, but finds no space for the oft-proposed adaptation of Metamorphosis.

David Lynch really is, therefore, a quaint, contradictory, idiosyncratic read. But it's the oddities, the rampaging strangeness - Chion declares Lynch the romantic film-maker of the age, no less - that elevate it above the usual cut-and-paste and make it both endearing and highly recommended.