Lemming (2005) User Reviews

A Mind-bending Film that Challenges the Viewer: What is Dream and What is Reality?

[gradyharp · 8/10 · 4 September 2006]

Nightmares have never been so decidedly well scripted as in LEMMING, another bizarre creation by French director Dominik Moll ('With a Friend like Harry', 'Intimacy') and writer Gilles Marchand ('Red Lights', 'Who Killed Bambi?', 'Bon voyage', 'Tender Souls', '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

A modern day nightmare, a young couple invite his boss and spouse to dinner and are surprised .

[heko1 · 8/10 · 19 May 2005]

A thrill from beginning to the end, constant tension keeps you wide awake. I like the way the tension is kept in a sort of mysterious Hitchcock kind of way. Better than Moll's film with a friend like Harry. I am becoming a fan of the work of Dominik Moll. The set is well chosen and the modern day French suburban houses are like real life . The acting by Charlotte Rampling is like she really breathes down your neck. I like the way the film was shot and the symbols that come out of the backgrounds. The shape of the mountain, the light by the lake, Charlotte Gainsbourg's eyes and the lemmings in the kitchen, suicide is not painless in this film, it takes you on a roller-coaster ride to where you never thought to end up in a movie theater. Good film, looking forward to the next Moll

Engaging and Intriguing Surrealistic Thriller

[claudio_carvalho · 8/10 · 18 November 2007]

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")

Sleight of hand

[harry_tk_yung · 10 December 2005]

This is a fascinating movie. The name of the game is "guess its genre". I should keep this report to a minimum so as not to spoil your fun.

The story starts innocently enough, with a young "model couple" Alain and Benedict, obviously still in honeymoon mode, entertaining Alain's boss Richard and his wife Alice at home. For a moment, it looks like a middle class sitcom when Alice, up to her eyebrows with gnawing jealousy, continues making a scene ending up in the couple making a hurried exit with Richard making profuse apologies. "Now the model couple can eat", observes good-natured Benedict after the older couple had left.

Things take an ominous turn as the older couple keeps coming back into the idyllic existence of the lovebirds. Along the way, there are sleight of hand from director Moll (whom many consider to be France's present day Hitchcock) which may be red herring, and again may not. Alain is an engineer and is designing for Richard's company a robotic camera which in appearance is a cross between an apple and a helicopter, a little hint of science fiction potentials. The mysterious appearance of a lemming (hence the title), a Scandianian rat, in the plumbing seem to have metaphysical implications, or perhaps psychological, whichever you fancy. Murder mystery and supernatural thriller are not out of the realm of possibilities as the story develops.

I won't go any further, but would just say that the story is so skillfully told and beautifully filmed that your attention is never allowed to wander. Much credit goes also to the elaborate use of sound effect, maybe even slightly overused. The twist, which comes at around the last half-hour of this 129 minute movie, is not among the most brilliant I have seen, but sufficient to hold the movie together. The strength of the movie is in how all the elements are put together and delivered in a fascinating mood.

The acting is more than competent. For those in the audience (including this one) who are not generally familiar with French actors, there is at least Anglo-French Charlotte Rampling, who go as far back as "Gorgie Girl" (1966) and was seen more recently in "Swimming pool" (2003).

Lemming was in competition earlier this year in Cannes, but didn't win.

Fails to satisfy its ambitions

[howie73 · 7/10 · 20 September 2006]

Lemming is a curious film. Starting as an off-key domestic drama, it soon mutates into a collision of different genres but never settles its frenetic agenda. It's not a bad film; it just doesn't work. Director Dominik Moll borrows from Lynch and Chabrol in this surreal psychodrama but doesn't bring his own vision to the fore, resulting in a so-so attempt at being different. There is also a self-conscious smugness about Lemming – the protracted gazes and obscure dialogue hints at something deeper but at its core is a numb realisation that nothing really has happened, and the lemming itself is revealed as a red herring, a mere symbol of nature's continual challenge to technological prowess.

The imaginary and the imagined conflict; scenes that seem absurd are really imagined by the protagonist Alain Getty, but what is problematic is the depiction of the supernatural elements. Moll says Getty's wife, Benedicte, is possessed by Alice, the dead wife of her boss's husband, and this in turn leads to a spiral of confusion and danger enveloping the downtrodden Alain.The question Lemming fails to answer and probably does not want to answer is: Is the film the province of Alain's warped memory or is it just a representation of Benedicte's possession of Alice? Moll doesn't seem to care. The bewildering ending confirms neither perspective and Moll even has the audacity to suggest it's a dream, which levels Lemming on par with Dallas. It's this confusing and confused air of ambiguity that ruins Lemming. It wants to be ambiguous for its own sake.

However, there are things to savour; most notably Charlotte Rampling's presence in the film. Her presence is so powerful and disturbing that she ruins the film for the other actors; and when she leaves the film early, Lemming never really recovers. Laurent Lucas lacks charisma as Alain, but perhaps this was Moll's intention. Charlotte Gainsbourg's role as Alice is two-dimensional. We never know what motivates her.

The sound effects also lack subtlety, especially in the nightmare scenes. What works best in Lemming is the Kubrickian sense of desolation that the film evokes; the clinical environments; the use of technology and the anonymous spaces. Lemming is worth a look though, even though ti fails to satisfy its ambitions.

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

[Terrell-4 · 6/10 · 7 July 2008]

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.

not Hitchcockian, Lewtonesque!

[matthewglasson · 8/10 · 30 October 2006]

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.

Well made film whose slickness almost succeeds in disguising a random and weak plot.

[colinmetcalfe · 7/10 · 5 January 2010]

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.

what an oddity!

[postmanwhoalwaysringstwice · 8/10 · 15 January 2007]

Dominik Moll's film "Lemming" is one of those thrillers that grips the viewer from the first frame, then doesn't let up until the grip is tight and recognizably restricting air. The film tells the story of a young couple who invite the man's boss to dinner for a quiet meal in their new house. Unfortunately the boss and his wife come immersed in their own problems, some of which they leave behind when they leave. All of the tension, peculiarity, and ambiguity that follows begins with a simple sink clog, and ends as one of the strongest thrillers of late. "Lemming" is a quaint little domestic drama shrouded in darkness that shows impressive talent by all involved, especially Charlotte Gainesbourg as the man's demure wife.

Cool, but lacking in angst

[paul2001sw-1 · 7/10 · 27 December 2008]

A cool thriller with a supernatural air, 'Lemming' has much to commend it, including a walk on role (so to speak) for the Pic du Midi d'Osseau, one of my favourite Pyrennean mountains. The story is actually quite limited, but M. Pollock and his wife both make an interesting pair of monsters and a frighteningly believable couple, and the movie's four-handed structure pits them nicely against the model pairing of the hero and his wife. Ultimately, it might have been better had the lemmings of the title seemed more connected to the meat of the story; but the acting is good, even if the hero is just a little too reserved for us to really feel his angst.

Lemming is Lifeless

[st-shot · 4/10 · 16 December 2007]

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.

french suspense in hitchockian style

[Didier-Becu · 8/10 · 4 June 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!

Extremely well-made, but the story is a long ride to nowhere

[gridoon2024 · 6/10 · 12 April 2015]

On the basis of "Lemming", Dominik Moll is a better director than writer. This film is extremely well-made, even hypnotic at times. But the story plays out slowly, and without much internal consistency or logic; at the end, there are many questions left unanswered. In fact, the only solid answer we do get is how the title creature, who lives in Scandinavia, ended up in France - though its relevance to the plot and the reason for its star billing remains an enigma! The film is also superbly acted by all four leads. Moll seems to be a very promising filmmaker - but maybe he should have invested just a little more effort in the story to make this come together as the subversive psychological thriller he intended it to be. **1/2 out of 4.

The onset of "Lemming" is catchy but then it gets bogged down in oil slick

[dbdumonteil · 4/10 · 4 September 2005]

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!

Got stuck in the kitchen sink

[Camera-Obscura · 23 February 2007]

I've recently been going through a couple of French films that lean heavily on the suspense. The French know their business. They make dozens of these every year. One might label them simply as thrillers. Some recent ones; this one, Haneke's CACHÉ (2005) (half-Austrian, all right), THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED (2005) together with Chabrol's - mostly late '60s - work. This dream-like suspense-yarn compares rather unfavourably to the other films mentioned. This is mostly due to the rather ridiculous subtext of the titular Lemming (the framework is built around the mysterious appearance of a dead lemming in the kitchen sink of a young couple). Furthermore, Charlotte Rampling's character behaves in such an abnormal way, it becomes too much to swallow. In a dream sequence, thousand of lemmings appear in the home of Alain Getty, the central character. But his wife, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, has an almost equally important part. Perhaps I misread the whole thing and this was all a highly associative nightmare sprung from the main characters' minds. In that case, not a very pleasant one. It's quite suspenseful up to a point, but after a while the characters begin to behave in such an irrational (and stupid) fashion, it becomes very tedious. I just wanna know what happened to the lemming?

Camera Obscura --- 5/10

Yeah, so what?

[cdimdb · 6/10 · 4 January 2007]

Well, I guess I enjoyed it. But then again I might have liked it more if the underlying driver for the story had not been tired old sexual jealousy again. It worries me that Martians tapping into Earth's filmic output will be forced to conclude that infidelity is humanity's only motivator. And that the whole business has now become so formulaic that it scarcely needs an actual event to get the process of destruction started.

Alain, after all, didn't actually *do* anything naughty. When the boss's wife comes on to him he acts with a restraint that is probably more unlikely than it is commendable. His only 'crime' is in not telling his wife all about it - which I would have though was a perfectly sensible choice given her whacko response when she finds out anyway. If keeping things to yourself is so terrible, how about her own failure to disclose the suspicion that festers within her thereafter, and ultimately leads to all the nastiness? I realise that these questions are all supposed to be tangential to the story, and we're supposed to concentrate on the mysterious dark influence of Alice on the lives of the couple and M. Pollock, with the strange presence of the lemming adding a weird metaphorical counterpoint to it all. And finally, the lemming is dead, along with both the Pollocks, nobody is sleeping with anyone they shouldn't, and life returns to suburban domestic bliss. Yeah, well, that's interesting - but I'm afraid my irritation with the weak underlying motivation failed to stretch my belief suspenders. Am I really supposed to accept that Alain and Bénédicte would not have sat down and talked about any of their respective worries, and continued to converse in sleepy monosyllables while the chaos mounted? Some here have compared this work with Lynch. I don't buy it. Lynch tells weird stories, only parts of which he puts on the screen. But they're all there if you hunt, and they're consistent when they have to be. This film had Lynchian moments, like the fantasy return home to a house full of lemmings, but Lynch wouldn't have pulled the punch the way this did.

I dunno. Maybe I'm missing things. Probably I'm missing things. Trouble is, I don't feel strongly enough to care. The only character whose fate and future I was really concerned about was the lemming.

CD

Intriguing and Dreamlike...

[JoeytheBrit · 7/10 · 1 December 2008]

Major Spoilers.

Lemming is a typically gallic take on the mystery thriller – and in this instance the 'mystery' is more 'wotappen' than 'whodunnit.' Laurent Lucas plays Alain Getty, a ever-so-slightly smug designer who finds his model marriage shredded by the wife of his boss, an acidic and malicious woman (Charlotte Rampling), who, after committing suicide (or does she?) possesses Alain's wife (or does she?) in order to persuade him to kill her errant husband (or does he? Or she? Or the other he?)

It could all be a dream. Alain dreams of a kitchen overrun with lemmings and, in his dream falls over and hurts his arm. He then wakes up in hospital, his broken arm in a cast, and is told he was in a car crash. But Alain distinctly remembers arriving home the night before, prompted to return from his business journey by his wife's uncharacteristic harshness over the phone. Director Dominik Moll plays with our perceptions and expectations, and relies upon an audience that is growing increasingly sophisticated to perhaps wrong-foot themselves by over-analysing what is happening on the screen.

The pace is slow, dream-like. The camera lingers on silent faces, watching them think, making the audience think (too much perhaps) with the characters. Alain finds a lemming he believes dead in the pipes beneath the kitchen sink. A specialist tells Alain's wife, the morning after his bosses wife has committed suicide in their spare room, that the idea of lemming's suicide is an absurd myth, that they are really just trying to get to the other side of whatever is before them – whether it is a river, a lake or an ocean. Mme. Pollock (the heavy-lidded Rampling) then perhaps hasn't simply committed suicide, but has crossed to the other side in order to achieve her objective.

The film is in no hurry to tell its story. There is no frantic editing, no cheap shocks – and no climax in the Hollywood sense of the word. The final shot has Alain watering his garden as his wife (the rangy, lugubrious Charlotte Gainsbourg) delivers the news that his boss has committed suicide, and the symbolism is obvious. A voice-over informs us that shortly after, the wife falls pregnant, and, remembering a brief conversation between the two women over the initial catastrophic dinner, we are left to wonder not only who the father is, but the mother also.

Draws you further and further

[tomsview · 9/10 · 28 November 2022]

It's almost as though "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" was reimagined by David Lynch in French.

"Lemming" has an intriguing plot and intriguing stars.

Over the years I have noticed the French do about the best psychological mystery films, maybe even outdoing the Scandinavians who are also heavy-hitters in the category. Hitchcock may have agreed, "Vertigo" was from an original story by a couple of French writers and Hollywood has often borrowed from the Gallic inventory.

Alain Getty (Laurent Lucas) is an Automation Engineer who has developed a cool little domestic flying spyware device that Big Brother could have used back in "1984". He is married to Bénédicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and they have just moved into a quiet home in the burbs of Toulouse.

When Alain invites his boss Richard Pollock (André Dussollier) and wife Alice (Charlotte Rampling) home for dinner, things are awkward from the get-go, and then get progressively weirder. Alice can't control the vitriol she feels towards her husband and their domestic disunity is played out in front of the bewildered young couple. But what seems to have been a one-off embarrassing evening takes on another dimension when Alice won't leave Alain and Bénédicte alone.

Then the lemming turns up. We learn some interesting things about lemmings, which add tension when Bénédicte swims far out in a secluded lake.

I won't give away any more of the plot, suffice to say it's a long movie, over two hours, but I didn't want it to end, I was enjoying the twists so much.

Fascinating seeing the two Charlottes in the same film, unusual beauties with charisma to spare.

The whole thing is played low-key. Bénédicte is preternaturally calm. At one point, the in-your-face Alice, after constant probing, asks Bénédicte if she ever gets angry?

Films like this that play games with your head often paint themselves into a corner and have weak resolutions. Not so here, the ending is as enigmatic as the rest of the film.

"Lemming" has a score by David Whitaker. An English composer and arranger, he had worked with top recording artists including Serge Gainsbourg, Charlotte's Dad. His subtle chords and use of the music of Johann Strauss help create the unexpected mood.

Suivez moi

[writers_reign · 7/10 · 28 April 2006]

This is arguably the best performance to date from Monty Clift look-alike Laurent Lucas or maybe it's the classiest movie he's been in so far. Even Charlotte Gainsbourg who I've always been able to take or leave (sorry, Yvan) as I have her old mum, Jane Birkin, turns in something at least resembling a performance here which is more than can be said for the ridiculously overrated Charlotte Rampling, who can't retire quick enough for me. Dom Moll is rapidly becoming a player but the downside here is that he's not fully in control of his material and seems to be trying to marry several genres - the comedy of manners, the satire, the suspense movie, the supernatural etc - so that the whole fails to fully satisfy as much as it might have. Andre Dussollier is the class act here and he doesn't disappoint; on balance it's certainly one to check out but not necessarily revisit and/or buy on DVD.

Unpaid rodent star steals movie

[rowmorg · 9/10 · 24 February 2007]

They say never play opposite children or animals, and LEMMING is yet another proof of the wisdom of this old motto. This diminutive creature, a large mouse, or small "prairie dog" makes its first appearance all wet and nearly dead when it is pulled from the U-bend under Charlotte Gainsbourg's sink. From then on, this four-legged natural steals the show. It was the other Charlotte, Rampling, who was supposed to intrude only four times into this film and overwhelm it with her acting presence, but no, it's a lemming, a small rodent from Scandinavia that I have never seen, nobody in the audience has ever seen, but which is world-famous for committing suicide. During the film, as in all great films, we learn something new: that lemmings actually don't commit suicide, but die of exhaustion. This is a risky concept to introduce into a French art movie in case the audience thinks about their own stamina. But in this case, it works --- and triumphantly. Everyone eventually gets their fifteen minutes of fame and this is it for the nordic lemming, a small yet determined animal that definitely tries harder. This deliciously strange movie will keep you guessing from start to finish. All an elaborate charade, naturally, but impeccably entertaining. Strongly recommended, particularly for bosses and CEOs.

A Nutshell Review: Lemming

[DICK STEEL · 6/10 · 22 August 2006]

The lemming has this reputation as a mindless creature which commits suicide by jumping off cliffs, and this has developed its connotation to various popular culture, and I do recall a computer game called Lemmings which features exactly that.

This movie, which opened the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, has a plot point related to this Lemming reference, but I shan't go into the details for obvious reasons. Directed by Dominik Moll, Lemming tells the story of the young Getty couple Alain (Laurent Lucas) and Benedicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who seem to be living the model life - a relatively successful husband, a beautiful wife, a large house in trendy suburbia. What more could they ask for?

Things start to go all wrong when Alain's boss and wife, Richard and Alice Pollock (played by Andre Dussollier and Charlotte Rampling), arrive one night late for a scheduled get together dinner, during which Alice's behaviour as a guest was utterly deplorable and downright rude. They end the night on quite a sour note, with Richard's philandering ways made public, and thus set in motion a series of unexplainable sequence of events that plague the Getty couple.

For moments this film couldn't decide how it wanted to play out, and this will leave you engaged throughout its painfully slow revelation. Yes you'll feel the length of the slowness in pace, but strangely would be forgiving and willingly allow to be hooked. From hints of a psychological thriller, to supernatural horror, or can even be boiled down to a demented imaginative mind, you will inadvertently try and decipher the plot, as well as attempt to classified its genre, which the filmmakers ensured that you possibly cannot, until the very last few scenes.

So perhaps it's best to mention something which the movie proposed, a thought about why a married man will choose to refuse getting entangled into an affair. Is it purely because of the love for the spouse, or simply because the chances of being caught one day is high, and not worth the risk? Each of us has an internal moral compass, which guides us on the general dos and don'ts, rights and wrongs. However, if there is a strong belief that you could do something incorrect, and get away with it, would you go ahead and do it? It makes for intriguing discussion.

The soundtrack was creepy though, with that lone piano plonking away in eliciting the necessary mood from the audience. And it does so quite perfectly as it raises your heartbeats, and while you're waiting for the final crescendo, it just holds it right there, and continued to hold that note till... well, nothing!

And I'd probably still recommend this movie if you're looking for different fare amongst offerings of the week, though you'd have to agree to be led from start to end. The revelation might make you wonder why the trouble to go through all the fuss, and given its simplicity in playing it out the way it had chosen to, it would give that unfulfilled feeling, that it could have lived up to its initial potential.

Stylish yet charmless film that asks the question: Who is more gullible, the movie's characters or it viewers?

[pspeakes · 3/10 · 27 September 2006]

In Moll's world we let people into our house to yell at us, throw drinks at each other, provoke us, and ultimately commit suicide in our spare room. Then we let their ghost into our bodies to screw up our marriage. OK. Still, it could have been dramatic or entertaining. On the plus side the photography is good and even beautiful in the mountains. On the sort of plus side, there was a thread of tension running through the movie and an atmosphere reminiscent of Todd Haynes's "Safe", though with none of the commitment of that movie. But the story never becomes believable. The relationships are never compelling - none of the depth of character or feeling between people in a movie like Solaris, for example. Consider how much simple human issues like privacy, isolation and irritation add to our sense of the human condition. Then look at the characters of Lemming: any of us would have thrown these people out of our lives after 5 minutes.

The Two Charlottes

[nycritic · 8/10 · 19 August 2006]

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.

One for the Lynch mob

[skymovies · 7/10 · 7 January 2007]

For Lucas and Gainsbourg's happily-weds Alain and Benedicte, the discovery of a rodent stuck down the sink is nothing like as peculiar as the dinner they host for Lucas' boss (Dussollier) and his bitchy, glacial wife Alice (Rampling).

The evening's aftermath is a slow-burning chain of events leading to the detonation of a marriage: seduction, suicide, possession, desperation.

A quietly unsettling exercise in Gallic detachment (albeit from a German director), Lemming frustrates and intrigues in roughly equal measure. It's like a lengthy extract from the David Lynch handbook.

As explained in the film, lemmings are not suicidal, they simply drown from exhaustion. At a over two hours, it's a metaphor which accurately describes the viewing experience.

A waste

[mfsor · 4/10 · 7 July 2006]

It's so easy, isn't it, to use the camera to do whatever you want, even if it is never more than anything else than a shaggy dog story. You can take an actress who's playing a person already dead, and stick her in front of the camera and use somebody else's voice. The bottom line is that the two major events of this film, 1) that Alain would accept Alice's overtures as far as he did, and 2) that they would not only stay in the house but leave the bloody stain on the wall, these two events ruin the film. Up to the first half hour it's great. I have clear ideas how to fix it up, but my ideas don't matter because I don't get to re-film it.