LEMMING shares a slight similarity with another thriller in which a couple's quiet life is imperceptibly turned upside-down. Michael Hanecke's CACHE, a story that focused on a couple played by Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil who begin receiving anonymous videocassettes that show them going through their daily routine, tells a much different story per se (the only common link being a surveillance camera), but begins to creep to its startling conclusion with such stealth it's possible to become bored by the proceedings and drift into a state of lethargy as the characters, while increasingly threatened, continue with their business as danger lurks just outside of the edges of the story's frame.
LEMMING is no different. It's so plain and happy to wallow in its sort of lazy imagery it threatens to lose the viewer who may become impatient to see "what happens next." Alain and Benedicte Getty are the yuppie married couple who invite an older married couple to dinner. The man, Richard Pollock, happens to be Alain's boss, and his wife Alice is -- to put it mildly -- a harridan whose behavior towards her husband and the Getty's (in particular Benedicte) has dinner crashing to a screeching halt. Oddly enough, Alice later tries to seduce Alain at work, but this wouldn't be the least of the Getty's issues. An inconsequential yet foreign lemming has crept into their piping and is apparently dead...
And then the weirdness starts. Alice shows up for a visit that turns quite nasty, Alain and Benedicte's marriage is rapidly unraveling, Getty's own sanity comes into question when he has a hallucination of an invasion of lemmings into his kitchen, and most of all, Benedicte now starts to act just like Alice, initiating an affair with Richard that has Alain resorting to surveillance using a neat little mini-copter of a camera. And then it gets really, really weird... but that's part of the fun: LEMMING is a quiet thriller that depends on the two Charlottes -- Rampling and Gainsbourg -- and their on-screen hatred of each other, which turns into a deadly, psychic transmogrification -- a possession of sorts --, and on staying a step ahead from the "second-guessing" bound to happen as the viewer tries to unravel what is real, what is supernatural, and what is both.
LEMMING is no different. It's so plain and happy to wallow in its sort of lazy imagery it threatens to lose the viewer who may become impatient to see "what happens next." Alain and Benedicte Getty are the yuppie married couple who invite an older married couple to dinner. The man, Richard Pollock, happens to be Alain's boss, and his wife Alice is -- to put it mildly -- a harridan whose behavior towards her husband and the Getty's (in particular Benedicte) has dinner crashing to a screeching halt. Oddly enough, Alice later tries to seduce Alain at work, but this wouldn't be the least of the Getty's issues. An inconsequential yet foreign lemming has crept into their piping and is apparently dead...
And then the weirdness starts. Alice shows up for a visit that turns quite nasty, Alain and Benedicte's marriage is rapidly unraveling, Getty's own sanity comes into question when he has a hallucination of an invasion of lemmings into his kitchen, and most of all, Benedicte now starts to act just like Alice, initiating an affair with Richard that has Alain resorting to surveillance using a neat little mini-copter of a camera. And then it gets really, really weird... but that's part of the fun: LEMMING is a quiet thriller that depends on the two Charlottes -- Rampling and Gainsbourg -- and their on-screen hatred of each other, which turns into a deadly, psychic transmogrification -- a possession of sorts --, and on staying a step ahead from the "second-guessing" bound to happen as the viewer tries to unravel what is real, what is supernatural, and what is both.