Lemming (2005) - film review

Alain Getty is a young robotics engineer whose latest invention, the Flying Webcam, delights his boss, Richard Pollock.  One evening, Alain invites Pollock and his wife, Alice, to dine at his home with his wife Bénédicte.  Alice spoils the evening by revealing her husband’s infidelity.  Later, Alain is working late in his laboratory when Alice appears and tries to seduce him, unsuccessfully.  Then, whilst Pollock is away on business, Alice returns to the Getty household and ends up killing herself.  Alain suddenly notices a change in Bénédicte, as though she has become another woman.  And what began this strange series of events? – A half-dead lemming blocking up the Gettys’ kitchen sink…

Director Dominik Moll followed his hugely successful Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien (2000) with a film that is even more weird and unpredictable, Lemming – his third and strangest film to date.  Part thriller, part social satire, part ghost story, the film shows how the ordered world of a seemingly well-balanced control-freak can be sent spinning out of control through a series of increasingly bizarre events, which ultimately lead him, and us, to find it hard to distinguish fantasy from reality.  Some may find the film just too off-the-wall to take seriously; others will relish its tongue-in-cheek absurdity, its barbed satirical edge and its strands of dark poetry.

If there is one word that defines the style of this film, that word is undoubtedly "Hitchcockian".  The presence of Alfred Hitchcock can be felt in virtually every scene of the film, although it is worth stating that Moll’s appropriation of Hitchcock’s technique is subtle and ingenious, rather than than a slavish and pointless homage.  There are also echoes of Claude Chabrol and Luis Buñuel’s work in the film’s mocking portrayal of the middle-classes, whose complacency and moral vacuity inevitably drag them, Lemming-like, to the precipice of doom.

All this sounds good but the film suffers from one fundamental weakness – the characters (despite the best efforts of an exemplary cast) are unconvincing – in fact they are less convincing than a batch of down-market androids running on Windows 95.  Whilst it is easy to be impressed by the film’s high production values (which include some of the most amazing CGI special effects to be seen in a French film), the failings in the script department are hard to overlook.  The dialogue is stilted and the plot flitters randomly between the banal and the supernatural without any rationale.   That the film works as well as it does is down almost entirely to the excellent contributions from its four leading actors, who each seems to have a worryingly acute appreciation of the twisted world in which Dominik Moll lives.

Charlotte Rampling is both tragically disturbing and hauntingly sensual as the engimatic Alice, the kind of character that makes Norman Bates appear to be a model of normality.  The other Charlotte (Gainsbourg, that is) also has a darkly sinister sensuality, although her character is so thinly developed she feels almost ghostlike (which, perversely, serves the story rather well).  Laurent Lucas is particularly good in this film – he holds the narrative focus and gives the film some measure of coherence, even if his character is far from being the conventional sympathetic male lead.  Whilst Lemming may not be on a par with Moll’s previous film, its sheer bizarreness and heady concoction of genres makes it worth watching.  Just don’t expect it all to make sense after just one viewing. Or even five.

© James Travers 2007

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