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Dominik Moll’s latest project is a transparently formal film
that plays along the narrative boundary between the psychological and the supernatural.
Like a surrealist’s representation of dream space, Lemming is visually very
clear, while its narrative erupts into moments of irrationality. In pragmatic English, Lemming
is a Hitchcockian exploration of sexual desire and infidelity, examining what it means
when "the body says yes, but the head says no."
Young and successful home automation engineer Alain Getty (Laurent
Lucas) has been settling into his new home with his "model" wife Benedict
(Charlotte Gainsbourg). At work he is tinkering with a remote camera eye that flies and
hovers like a helicopter. A thoroughly modern Frenchman, Alain is disarmingly naive in
his faith in the rational world. His devotion to control, mirrored not just in his career
and work project, but also stylistically in the sleek, white lines of his ultramodern
house, neighborhood, and laboratory, almost begs to be violated, or, as the French might
say, for the irrational to erupt into his model life. It turns up one evening,
symbolically, in the form of a curious red herring – his kitchen drain has been
plugged up by what proves to be a lemming. This is odd, as lemmings are native to
northernmost Scandinavia and are unknown in France. Odder still, this one comes back to
life.
At the center of the story is a game of supernatural menage a
trois, among Alain and Benedict, Alain’s boss Richard Pollock (Andre Dussollier)
and his shrewish wife Alice (Charlotte Rampling). Arriving very late for their first
dinner as guests of Alain and Benedicte, Alice appears sullen and discomfited; she
unleashes a torrent of verbal abuse on her husband, who has, yet again, been discovered
"sleeping with whores." Like the symbolic, yet real rat in Truly,
Madly, Deeply, the arrival of the lemming signals the ghost in the machine of the
Gettys’ marriage. Dreams, blackouts, jump cuts, and non sequitorious personality
shifts quickly pull the audience in, begging the suspension of disbelief. Loss of control
and descent into frenzy or only a treacherous appearance of chaos?
Lemming contains wonderful cinematic touches and seems custom
designed for the serious movie lover. A romantic mountain cabin conjures otherworldly
escape. A cloud-swathed Alpine peak embodies the nightmare (the Alps once connoted
"nightmare," now by extension "the subconscious"). The aging modernist
architecture of most of the sets echoes Truffault’s vision in Fahrenheit
451. Similarly, both Richard and Alice manifest oddly manipulated behaviors –
beyond the logic of dream, the pull of some invisible supernatural force seems to be
controlling them. Only Alain seems to escape it directly, but he becomes something of a
running joke for the film when, as in Nathaniel West’s novel A Cool Million, he
is broken and beaten down, limb by limb, scene by scene.
Charlotte Rampling delivers a thoroughly credible, at times shocking
performance, as a madwoman who did not end up in the attic. Andre Dussollier achieves a
fine-tuned balance, between the charisma of a successful haute-bourgeois businessman used
to getting his way and the hen-pecked husband who no longer feels guilty for what his
behavior has done to his wife. Charlotte Gainsbourg charms as the ideal young bride,
anticipating her husband's whims, compliant, sexually desirable and desirous of pleasing
her husband by being sexually aggressive/"frisky" -- her husband's own private
whore/Madonna. And Laurent Lucas never waivers, as he is stripped, step by step, of
dignity and his clothes, steadfastly very much the model husband he believes himself to
be. Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf partners up with one hell of a shaggy dog in Lemming.
- Les Wright
