Customer Reviews

Lemming (Original French Version - With English Subtitles)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Dominik Moll's Lemming is being billed as a sort of Hitchcockian suspense thriller, a type of David Lynch psychic puzzle, where viewers are lambasted with images, which could either be fact or fantasy. The movie starts off strong - the first thirty minutes are indeed compelling - but when the gorgeous Charlotte Rampling leaves the film, the pacing slows, the narrative grinds to a halt and the movie becomes a bit of a slog to watch.

Laurent Lucas and Charlotte Gainsbourg play Alain and Benedicte, an upwardly mobile and successful couple. He's a remote-control gadget designer and she stays at home to look after their new house. Outwardly things are picture perfect, but the couple begins to encounter a series of peculiar upheavals after they host a dinner for Alain's boss (Andre Dussollier) and his brittle and unhinged wife, Alice (Charlotte Rampling).

Alice - for reasons that become clear as the dinner progresses, ends up venting her anger on her philandering husband, which cuts the evening short. Both Alain and Benedicte put it down to experience and even find time to casually joke about it, but after Alice tries to seduce Alain at work and then tells Alice about it the next day, this perfect couple begins to unravel. Alice, of course, is a piece of work, having set out to annihilate pleasure wherever it exists.

Things come to a head when Benedicte begins to exhibit Alice's obsessive rage that turns this previously sunny and laid-back woman into a cruel, cold and heartless witch. It gets even more mysterious when Alain finds a lemming blocking up the kitchen drainpipe. But the discovery of the lemming - and the fact that it's still alive seems beside the point - because the focus turns to Alain and Benedicte and how Alice, has managed to plant the seeds of doubt about the strength of their marriage.

The film works best when Rampling is in it and she beautifully captures this heartless and embittered woman, who is fed up with her husband and is intent to take out her anger on those around her, especially with those whom she sees as younger and more fortunate. Things get complicated when there's a grisly suicide, an affair, and even a murder, but it's never clear why any of these occur.

Even the ghost of one of the characters makes an appearance, which provokes a real head-scratching moment. And as Benedicte and Alain head for the country - ostensibly to sort out their relationship and try to restore their communication with each other - the film slows and begins to wears out its eerie mood, and there's little to justify dragging it out for more than two hours.

Of course, the themes of the movie are the lies we tell each other, and the hidden desires we all have, but with all its bloodiness, voyeurism, ghosts, sexual fantasy, dream imagery, and murder - it all ends up being a bit flat and opaque. Still, the cast is superb - particularly Ms. Rampling and for most of the time the atmosphere ably morphs from the calm to the foreboding.

The main problem of this film is that there is just too much ambiguity and uncertainty, and the collective inexplicability of events eventually overstrains credibility. While Lemming is in parts fascinating and fun, this constant vagueness makes it annoying and the movie as a whole rapidly becomes wearisome. Mike Leonard August 06.

Nightmares have never been so decidedly well scripted as in LEMMING, another bizarre creation by French director Dominik Moll ('Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien', 'Intimité', 'Le Gynécologue et sa secrétaire') and writer Gilles Marchand ('Feux rouges', 'Qui a tué Bambi?', 'Bon voyage', 'Les Âmes câlines', 'Joyeux Noël'). As played by a superlative quartet of actors - Charlotte Rampling, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Laurent Lucas, and André Dussollier - the film is no easy path to follow but one that in retrospect seems to fit together like a Chinese puzzle.

The story involves the 'model couple' who invite the rogue older couple to dinner where a belated arrival heralds the singly strange behavior of the boss' wife. When the outrageously 'eccentric' wife subsequently is thwarted in a seduction of the model husband and the model husband fails to immediately communicate this embarrassing encounter to his young wife, the nightmare begins: the tale embraces suicide, alienation, adultery, philandering, murder, abandonment, a car crash - all seemingly related in a linear sense. But as it turns out, in the end of the film the events appear to be the fodder of a nightmare that could only have been induced by a simple initial guilt of lack of communication.

The 'lemming' of the title refers not only to a Scandinavian rodent that is found in the plumbing of the young couple's kitchen, but it also is part of the nightmare of the concept that lemmings 'commit suicide' in their migration from their overpopulated Scandinavia to the oceans of death beyond their home. In retrospect each piece of the bizarre story is laid very carefully in the opening of the film, at times a bit occult but the pieces are there. Rampling and Gainsbourg are their usual beautiful and gifted selves in very tough roles, and the entire cast is on target, succeeding in catching us off guard at every turn. Perhaps this is not a 'great movie', but it certainly is a fine exercise for the mind and gives further evidence that Dominik Moll is a formidable artist. Grady Harp, September 06

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.

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.

I enjoyed this quite a lot. The cast is uniformly excellent: in particular, Charlotte Rampling, who is not in the film all that much, makes a strong impression and the lead Laurent Lucas does a great job as a man trying to wade through a series of bizarre incidents that wind up blasting a huge hole in the veneer of pleasant bourgeois success that is his life and relationship with Charlotte Gainsbourg. Lucas is not always the easiest actor to connect with but that reserved and distant quality serves this particular film very well. The script has some nice twists and turns and gets at some fundamental questions about how, despite one's best efforts to control one's life and environment through ritual and rules and containment, things are by nature precariously balanced and always potentially in jeopardy of collapse. It's also pretty funny and should appeal to people with an appropriately dark sense of humor.

Several reviewers have commented that the second half of the film disappointed them; I did not find such a fall off myself and thought the narrative went in the right direction and resolved itself quite satisfyingly. If you have a fondness for that strange feeling of unease that can come over you in those sorts of thrillers where a dreamlike quality of unpredictability directs the proceedings, you should try this one out. It's well conceived, smartly executed, well directed, and well acted.

A suicidal lemming shows up in a drainpipe before the boss's wacky wife commits suicide in the nice young couple's apartment. Things go very wrong from there. It's funny at times and a little creepy, too. The meaning is somewhat lost, but you'll enjoy the classic French meaningful looks with minimal dialogue, if you like French cinema. I had no idea Charlotte Rampling spoke French so well. She was hot back in her Woody Allen days. Too long by 30 mins, but still worth watching.

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.

Strange, ironic, compelling, subversive and disturbing.

Visual and verbal metaphors abound, both intended and found.

Great looking and wonderfully unsettling.

What's really going on here as seemingly perfect lives start
to come apart soon after a lemming is found clogging a kitchen sink?

See it without knowing anything more and you're in for a
noirish French cocktail with a twist of Lynch and Hitchcock.

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.

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.