Lemming (2005)

The latest festival in Cannes (2005 that is) was opened by the French movie "Lemming" which meant a lot for the French cinema as after all, it was directed by Dominik Moll. Moll has already been described as the French equivalent of Alfred Hitchcock and even if 4 movies are a bit too less to speak of such a comparison, the symptoms are there. Moll's previous masterpiece ("Harry") was already one of the finest pieces of French cinema you'll ever going to see and in "Lemming" Moll just goes on the path that suits him best. We are witnessing a modern couple, Benedicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and Alain (Laurent Lucas), who are building their luck. Everything's got pretty disturbed when one day Alain decides to invite his boss (Andre Dussolier). The wife's boss (Charlotte Rampling) seems at first a shameless bitch who is fed up with her husband's flirts but a deeper look, let us see that the woman is more than just a tragic figure. Coincidence or not, but all problems started when the couple found a lemming in their sink. A lemming is a sort of rat which only lives in Scandinavian countries (and we're somewhere in France) whose way of living is determined by its suicidal character. It's business as usual that people start to compare one movie to another but Moll made a great effort which can compete with the best things François Truffaut has done. The viewer is like some peeping tom who sees the high and lows in a marriage and it goes hand in hand with genius acting from both Charlotte Gainsbourg and Laurent Lucas. Now already one of the movies of 2005!

Fmovies: In 2000, Dominik Moll had introduced us Harry in "With a Friend Like Harry" (2000), a charismatic and mysterious character admirably acted by Sergi Lopez who by wishing Michel's well had managed to break his peaceful household although it was a bit on the edge on a knife. Five years later, he returned to the attack with the long-anticipated "Lemming" starring once again Laurent Lucas. This time it's not one person who is nasty to him but two offbeat people: André Dussollier and Charlotte Rampling. There's a major difference with Moll's previous opus: "Lemming" doesn't match "With a Friend Like Harry"'s brilliance at all because it's too woolly, incoherent to hold water whereas the former work was absolutely clear in its script and didn't present the single mistake in its logical way of thinking.

The movie promises great things but loses steam halfway through. It gets off to a good start with a Chabrolian aura to let the vices of a seemingly well-behaved and respectable upper-class couple show through. Even better, Moll has the capacity to create from a trite situation an ominous atmosphere which makes the viewer feel uncomfortable. Is there anything more trite than a dinner with one's boss? But when Rampling asks Dussollier the following question: "Was it one of your b******?", a feeling of unpleasantness invades the viewer and stays inside him or her until the middle of the film. And an eerie Charlotte Rampling excels in a part which requires ambiguity, mystery. Her motivations towards Lucas and her frail spouse Charlotte Gainsbourg remain undetermined: does she try to put an end to their love life or isn't she prey to madness? And one could also specify that her husband as weird as her tries to make life impossible to Lucas. Perhaps, he try to split them too. Be that as it may, after this memorable evening, the movie takes the way of the fantastic and one figures that we have a first-class movie between one's hands. The making evolutes on the razor's edge, the unusual nature of the movie is slowly and softly hatched, the relationships between the characters become blurred, the strangeness of the situations alarm...

Alas, in the middle of the course, it's downhill and the attention ends up diluting itself in the ins and outs of a convoluted and tortuous story à la David Lynch and the protagonists' psychological drifts remove the flick all charm and all cohesion. Because it wants too much, "Lemming" loses its efficiency and the whole crew loses the plot. Moll's work is also marred by a cosy end which takes the easy way.

If "With a Friend Like Harry" occupies a prominent place in my favorite movies made in 2000, "Lemming" has a prime place in the category of the dashed hopes of 2005. If you are a David Lynch buff, this one has your name on it and for the others: caution!

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.

Lemming fmovies. 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.

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.