Lemming

The Gettys have an older couple to their house for dinner at the opening of Lemming, Dominik Moll's strange thriller from last year. Inventor and designer Alain (Laurent Lucas) and his fetching wife Bénédicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg) appear content, affectionate towards one another and hopeful for the future, having just moved to a spacious new home in the South of France. Their dinner guests, Alain's boss Richard Pollack (André Dussollier) and his wife Alice (Charlotte Rampling), are the exact opposite - angry, shrill and unable to sit peacefully next to one another through a single salad course.

Gradually, through machinations both everyday and supernatural, the older couple's marriage will unravel the younger couple's. Somewhere in between the blissful happiness of the Gettys and the venomous hostility of the Pollacks, Moll seems to suggest, the truth lies.

Moll's films revolve around irrational behavior and unpredictability. Interpersonal dramas that slowly develop into psychological horror, including the masterful Hitchcockian thriller With a Friend Like Harry, Moll's movies confront us with an almost elemental fear. What if the people around you quite simply ceased to make sense? What if their personal motives became inscrutible? When we all rely on colleagues, friends, family members and neighbors to conduct the business of our lives, we come to depend on certain unspoken understandings, certain social contracts that, when violated, can make us feel betrayed, alienated and frightened.

In With a Friend Like Harry, Moll presents a platonic friend as nemesis. Kind of a dramatic twist on What About Bob?, a seemingly-normal acquaintance begins to develop an unhealthy obsession with the protagonist's family, inserting himself forcibly into the "sacred" world of the man's home. Now, in Lemming, Moll tackles the even more complex morass of marriage, dissecting it as an institution with a critical lens that's bitter but, eventually, finds room for optimisim. This is one of the most fascinating, ingenious and difficult films that I have seen all year.



Two peculiar things happen after that initial dinner party that change the Gettys lives forever. First, the very unhappy and highly eccentric Alice Pollack becomes fixated on the young marrieds, showing up at the house unexpectedly to interrogate Bénédicte and at the office to try and seduce Alain. Second, the titular rodent, a Scandanavian species making a rare appearance in France, is found clogging up the plumbing below the kitchen sink.

Surely the two events are related somehow, and Moll spends a good deal of the film extending and enhancing this central metaphor. Certainly, Alice is very very unhappy, quite possibly willing to take her own life, and lemmings are famous for traveling great distances in order to drown themselves. Nicholas Chevalier (Jacques Bonnaffé), a small mammal expert, informs Bénédicte that lemmings are not really suicidal, despite what the legends say, but in actuality drown because they lack the strength to cross large bodies of water during migration. They're not bent on self-destruction; they merely die from fatigue.

Similarly, the Pollacks marriage has crumbled into an enterprise defined mainly through exertion. At the dinner party that opens the film, Alice informs her hosts that her husband regularly cheats on her with whores. She later confesses to Alain that Richard attempted to kill her many years before. She only stays with him, she protests, because she wants to see him die. Perhaps her descent into rage and madness resembles the incomplete voyage of the lemmings. She has not set out to bring her life to an end, but merely expires from the labor of pretending to love a man she despises.

Though it's overall a far more promising relationship, the Gettys union is not without cracks and fissures. Alain, whose work involves the development of a remote-controlled flying webcam allowing homeowners to look in on their dwellings via computer, seems to have an unhealthy taste for voyeurism. (Later, he'll use the camera to spy on a couple in flagrante through their front windows).

The Gettys marriage, in many ways, is defined by perpetual scrutiny. (In this way, Lemming occasionally resembles Michel Hanecke's thriller from last year, Cache.) After the lemming incident, a video camera is sent in to inspect their pipes, with Moll's camera gliding gently above the viscous brown sewage towards a grim, uncertain destination. Additionally, the Gettys are carefully observed by the Pollacks during and after the first dinner party - Alice mocks them as a "model" couple and declares Bénédicte "pathetic" while Richard openly admits to sizing up Alain's wife. Eventually, the Gettys willingness to reveal themselves will be taken advantage of when a supernatural force invades the serenity of their home and even their minds.

Borrowing a conceit from Ingmar Bergman's Persona, Moll eventually gives the movie over completely to allegorical fantasy. Beyond simply mirroring some of her atittude and circumstances, Bénédicte actually seems to transform into Alice at a certain point (apparently after spending the night in a guest room where Alice had been). The ambiguity of the first 90 minutes or so, in which Moll suggests some surreal goings-on but keeps the action potentially grounded in reality, gives way to Lynchian dream logic that removes the story from the realm of the possible and thus blunts some of the final impact. It's enough, I would think, to subtley infer the "possession" storyline, making the film more singular, broadly applied and unsettling.

Like Lynch in his best work, Moll relies heavily on changes in color to highlight a scene's emotional subtext or to alter the tone and mood. The early stages, in which the Gettys merrily live and play in good cheer, are bright and warm, brilliant sunny days set in earth tones. Once the lemming comes out of the sink, a rat-like creature that at first appears dead but soon jerks back to life, Moll vascillates between light sequences and long scenes shot in cold, steely blues.

Jean-Marc Fabre's cinematography reaches its pinnacle in a beautiful, eerie scene at a lake house. Alain awakes to find himself alone, his wife having left in the car for an unknown destination. Everything is drenched in a deep blue, as if he's awoken already at the bottom of the sea with the expired lemmings, unable to remain afloat from the intense strain of it all. It's a haunting image, a rich blue sun setting over a cartoonishly-saturated ocean, alien and almost frightening.

And I do mean frightening. Much like the aforementioned Mr. Lynch's films, Lemming veers quickly between the thought-provoking and the scary. Though Moll doesn't stoop to actual "scare shots," he does make use of the kind of musical crescendos and all-concealing shadows that permeate horror filmmaking. The only difference is that, rather than monsters or serial murderers skulking around every corner, the characters are pursued by familiar faces, faces that once represented love and acceptance and have only recently curled up into angry snarls.

When Alice shows up at the Gettys house to confront Bénédicte (about what it's not quite clear), she asks the younger woman if she fears the future, when her relationship with her husband will inevitably sour. With his surprisingly optimistic ending, Moll seems to disagree with Alice's hardened outlook, suggesting that some couples can avoid the pratfalls that turned the Pollack's marriage into a soul-sucking prison of despair. The Gettys, then, are those rare lemmings with the strength to push across the rushing waters that claim so many of their bretheren. Is it worth even posing the most obvious question? Why they bother to try and cross the uncrossable river in the first place?