Lemming

Things begin to slide precipitously downhill for the young and upwardly mobile Getty's upon recovering a lemming very far from home in the trap under the kitchen sink at their home in a staid and dreary suburbia in Toulouse, France. More imbalance takes place as the husband has his boss and wife over for supper. The wife (Charlotte Rampling) creates a scene and the evening ends badly. She attempts later to seduce Allain Getty then follows this with a very destructive visit to Getty's wife. The Getty marriage now begins to disintegrate. Irrationality ensues, the ugliness increases-very slowly. Eventually we learn how the lemming ended up so far away from home. The end.

Lemming is a slow moving, lifelessly acted "suspense thriller" that is shooting for something higher with the ambiguous presence of the title character. I'm sure it has a variety of symbolic significances that the cahiers crowd could ruminate over for hours. For me though it is a contrived distraction that is unable to save this turgid Chabrol like (I apologize for being redundant.)bore and its cast of zombies.

Looking like a calcified Charles Bronson, Charlotte Rampling is miserable in every way. She's had an impressive late career with powerfully enigmatic performances in such films as Under the Sand and Swimming Pool but she fails to get beyond robotic in Lemming. The rest of Director Dominik Moll's cast barely remains awake. The audience may be more hard pressed to do so. Lemming has a couple of jolting moments but no where near enough to keep it mildly interesting for over two hours. It belongs with the doomed lemming, down the drain.

Well made, glossy, professional, well acted in fact everything about it was great except the story and a weak premise. I like the fact it was unpredictable and you didn't know what was going to happen next, but that was because I couldn't make my mind up as to what type of film it was.

If you believe there should be no rules in story telling and you can throw in what you like, when you like then you will like this. On the other hand if you think David Lynch and his like make it up as they go along in between having a good laugh at everybody who reads so much into their films then you won't.

The automation engineer Alain Getty (Laurent Lucas) and his beloved wife Bénédicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg) have just moved to the suburb of Bel-Air. Alain has developed the prototype of a flying web-cam for Pollock S.A., a high-tech company. After a successful presentation of his project to their clients, Alain invites his boss Richard Pollock (André Dussollier) and his wife Alice (Charlotte Rampling) for dinner at his home. The couple arrives late, and Alice is extremely rude, insulting her husband and the young couple, and forcing Richard to leave the house earlier. During the night, Alain finds a rare Scandinavian lemming stuck in the siphon of the sink in the kitchen. On the next night, Alice unsuccessfully tries to seduce Alain after-hours in the laboratory of the company. On the next afternoon, she visits Bénédicte to apologize her behavior and cynically tells her sexual harassment to her husband. Then she locks herself in a room and commits suicide. On the next days, Bénédicte changes her behavior and relationship with Alain, seeming to be possessed by Alice.

"Lemming" is an engaging and intriguing surrealistic thriller. The screenplay follows the school of David Lynch, with a mysterious metamorphosis of Bénédicte into Alice, at least in her behavior. The development of the original and suspenseful plot is fantastic, making impossible to guess what is exactly happening. The beauties of Charlotte Rampling, with almost sixty years old, and Charlotte Gainsbourg are impressive, and the seduction of Alice is an extremely sexy, erotic and beautiful scene. "Lemming" was a great surprise for me and I highly recommend this film for viewers that aim to see a challenging movie where it is impossible to find what is daydream or reality. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Lemming, Instinto Animal" ("Lemming, Animal Instinct")

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.

I saw this film today and thought it was beautifully constructed with layers of metaphor and 'reality' that one can choose to attend to at will. I don't think the film was Hitchcockian - the pace was much more leisurely and atmospheric than most Hitchcock or American films. However, if there is any point of comparison, i would say it is with Val Lewton, who seemingly loved making stories about the supernatural aspects of human relationships (and the screeching train reminded me of the braking bus in 'Cat People'). By the end of 'Lemming' i totally accepted the bizarre rationality implied as an explanation for the whole thing - those actors and Moll made me believe it.