Lemming (2005)

The story of a troubled relationship festering between two couples: young Alain Getty (Laurent Lucas), a home automation engineer, and his wife, sweet Bénédicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg); and middle-aged Ándre (Richard Pollock), Alain`s boss, who is married to the mysterious Alice (Charlotte Rampling). The encounter does not leave the young couple`s harmony unscathed. The discovery of a mysterious rodent`s corpse blocking the waste pipe of their kitchen sink does nothing to help and portends the bursting of irrationality into a hitherto orderly life.

LEMMING was a selection in the Cannes Film Festival and the Telluride Film Festival, 2005.

We need a stronger key motivator, I think, but at least we learn about lemmings

Lemming starts promisingly with the dinner party from hell. A young, much in love couple is preparing dinner for their guests, his boss and the boss' wife. Alain Getty (Laurent Lucas) is the newly hired home automation designer at The Pollack Company. He's smart, decent and good-looking. His wife, Benedicte, is alert, pretty and bright. She cooks. He tastes. They smooch. Then their guests show up. His boss, Richard Pollack (Andre Dussollier), is older, gracious and friendly. Alice Pollack (Charlotte Rampling), grim and puffy-eyed, is something else, from the sunglasses she wears at table to the glass of wine she throws in her husband's face. In between, the young couple hears her accusations of his infidelity. She trains her venom on the young wife as she leaves. On top of all this, the kitchen sink's drain is stopped up with what we later find is a lemming.

So far, so good.

But if we were expecting the clever, unnerving suspense of director Dominik Moll's With A Friend Like Harry from 2000, we're going to be not only disappointed but also surprised at Moll's miscues. The blame must be shared with his co-writer, Gilles Marchand. There simply are no motivations or situations that arise other than what, over and over, Moll and Marchand create out of thin air for us. That is, of course what the movies are all about. But with A Friend Like Harry, all we had to do was accept one unlikely situation...that there might be someone lurking about like Harry. Once we swallowed that hook, we were caught. With that accepted, everything else Moll threw at us was accepted, however unlikely or extreme. With Lemming, there's no first cause that makes sense or is believable. The hook we have to swallow is that Alain's hormone's will respond to the aging stimulus of Mrs. Pollack's unsmiling attempt at seduction, and that Alain's involuntary and momentary arousal makes him just as guilty as if he'd agreed to jump in the sack with her. Alain doesn't agree to do that, regardless of how a few hormones responded, because he honorably loves his wife. Moll needs a motivating cause for what he has in store for us. This isn't believable enough, but Moll doesn't seem to notice. He gives us a director's indulgence. Consequently, everything that follows is a director's indulgence, too.

The first 46 minutes of Lemming, even if not especially engaging, have a nice uneasiness about them, culminating in a genuinely unexpected action. From then on, however, I was never especially engaged in the creepy shenanigans of isolated cabins, dreams, waves of rodents, adultery, the Mini Flying Webcam, hints of the Exorcist, murder and even the origin of lemmus lemmus and how one got stuck in a drain in the south of France. All seemed to be manipulations of a director who, this time, might not have been as smart as he thought he was.

If Moll with his lemming wants to deal in metaphors, perhaps our metaphor should be the last thing we hear...Mama Cass and the rest of the Mamas and the Papas singing Dream a Little Dream of Me. It's a great song but we have it pasted a little pretentiously onto the end of a French psycho thriller. As hard as this is to say, Mama Cass doesn't exactly swing it.

Lemming looks just fine. There are no extras of any importance. July 7, 2008

The Furry One

You know that there is going to be trouble when Charlotte Rampling as Alice, wife of Andre (Richard Pollock) walks...no dangerously slides into the home of Alain Getty (Laurent Lucas) and his wife Bénédicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg): dark sunglasses perched on her patrician nose, hands in her pocket, mouth in a snarl and nose literally up in the air. Though she doesn't say it, you know she is thinking: "So this is how the other half lives. Huh?"
Andre is Alain's boss so both he and Bénédicte are on their best behavior but Alice doesn't adhere to the niceties of social behavior as she (Charlotte Rampling), whose sparing but provocative venting cuts the evening short as before long she hurls a glass of red wine into Andre's face: so much for a quiet, serene dinner between work friends.
That night, Alain extracts from his sink pipe a lemming (to which the title refers and which is indigenous to Scandinavia); the next day, Alice tries to seduce Alain at work, if "seduction" is even the correct word here as Alice blankly asks scared to his core Alain, "Do you want to sleep with me," by which point the weirdness train has officially left the station.
Director Dominik Moll, who also directed the terrific thriller, "With a Friend like Harry" knows his way around this material and he has cast his film perfectly: Laurent Lucas (playing a role here very similar to one he played in "Harry"...a man perplexed about the unusual circumstances with which he is confronted), with his wide expressive eyes and face gives us layers of truth as his performance unfurls. His Alain is smart, kind and loving and he is the one around which all the action revolves.
Unfortunately, Charlotte Rampling leaves the film early and her departure leaves a gaping hole in the film.
Moll is dealing with a number of things here: sexual desire, mostly misdirected, voyeurism, sexual fantasy yet, unlike as in "Harry," which had a delectably nerve-jangling quality, whenever he searches similar veins in this scenario he succumbs to a kind of pride of perversion: showing us but not revealing anything knew about his themes.
February 23, 2008

Subtitles always present

This DVD from Strand Releasing comes with the English subtitles always present. If you are able or want to try to follow the original French without the subtitles, they are ever-present and difficult to ignore. Except for that, the DVD is well produced, and the format is wide screen. November 17, 2007

Well Done Psychological Thriller

Just as a lemming inexplicably wedges itself into a young French couple's plumbing system - so a woman's hatred and bitterness insinuates itself into this couple's lives, into their psyches.

I wouldn't say this movie goes so far as to have a David Lynch quality, as the DVD jacket touts. The unfolding here is much more realistic, less surrealistic than Lynch. But there is a preternatural element at work in the dynamics between the main characters.

This is an adult movie - adult in the sense that the director allows time and space and the unsaid to create the tension. It's not just one onslaught of weirdness after another, like you find in a lot of would-be thrillers. The suspense is this movie is intrinsic.

Charlotte Rampling is fascinating, as ever. She and all the actors have that sterling ability to concentrate. It's this quality that raises acting into a true art.

"Lemming" isn't dubbed. You will have to read English subtitles if you don't speak French. And the subtitles are printed so large that they spilled off the edges of my TV screen on occasion. But since the dialogue here is so succinct and paced, you won't find the mood being broken by having to read subtitles.

Subtitles and all, this movie is absorbing - mesmerizing.
March 19, 2007

A methaphysical thriller with the great Charlotte Rampling

If there is an influence in this attractive film by Dominik Moll it's Edgar Allan Poe and Edward Albee, rather than Alfred Hitchcock. Revealing more about the Poe influence would spoil the film, but it will be clear to anybody when they finish watching.
All in all, this is a strong effort by Dominik Moll, who directed the similarly intriguing "With a Friend Like Harry".
That was a superior, probably near great film. Lemming is a very good one, and anyone entering it should be warned that this is not a conventional thriller, but rather something of a metaphysical puzzle, with very malignant undertones and ominous happenings (like the disturbing appearance of the creature which gives the film its name).
In less able hands, the film could border on the cliched and the pretentious, but Moll knows how to weave a compelling story with appropiately eerie touches. At every step of the way, a most disturbing surprise arises, and there is no peace for the young middle class couple (Laurent Lucas and Charlotte Gainsbourgh) unexpectedly assaulted by the chaotic life of a much older and sinister couple, played by Andre Dussolier and Charlotte Rampling.
The film is greatly helped by the presence of the great Rampling, in full bitch goddess mode. Although her appearance is relatively brief, she is the ravaged, brutal, mysterious heart of this film.
February 4, 2007

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