Review:

Lemming Review

A childless, young upwardly mobile couple have recently moved into Bel Air, France after the breadwinner, Alain Getty (Laurent Lucas), is offered a prominent engineering post at a home automation development firm. His waifish plain-jane wife, Benedicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg), stays home to fix up the new house for their idyllic and promising futures together. On the other end of the age and marriage spectrum are Alains boss, Richard (Andre Dussollier) and his wife Alice Pollock (Charlotte Rampling) who are bitterly unhappy, jaded and loveless. 

Rampling, who ages beautifully here, is the films undisputed ace in the hole. Alices dour disposition, invective barbs and countenance bears years of experience and portrays a failing resilience. She unsettles the characters and audience through sheer concentration in her eyes, fueled by sexual psychosis and misanthropic menace. She proves indispensable in Dominik Molls Lemming by embodying the essence of the films desire to be inscrutable, sinister and haunting.

After a riled dinner invitation from the Gettys to the Pollocks, their conversance brings together unexpected revelations and nasty consequences for the young couple. Much like Mike Nichols classic 1966 meditation on adult relationships in Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, there is so much more to be said for what stays undisclosed than what is eventually revealed in this tense chamber piece when the worlds of these contrasting marriages collide. I would go amiss if I didnt offer up a caveat before anyone embarks on this film, since one should not go into this with preconceptions of the plot from mere synopsis and should shed presumptions about its utterly fluid and amorphous genre.

Ambiguity is the main agenda when it comes to Lemming and is wide open to interpretations that correspond with its intrinsic logic. A supernatural, metaphysical appeal is absorbed into the reaching and mind-warping narrative that is telling of the impacts towards bourgeois ennui that are brought upon by sudden and unwelcome confrontations with the couples hidden and tacit insecurities. It never betrays the overwrought and complex buildup to its atmosphere of foreboding thats layered with a compellingly portentous and minimalist sound design brilliantly augmenting the ominous quality of its anxious interactions.

Right at its core, Lemming is a tale of imaginative and capricious parallels that is executed with Lynchian bravura at its major highs but ends up tangling itself with structural knots during its manic lows. Apart from its digressions concerning supernatural connotations and over-the-top reactions, the overly patient and disquieting approach draws a certain semblance to Hanekes Cache in the structuring of quaint suburban lives dealing with intrusion and its subsequent disintegration of those lives. Eccentricies and composed sensibilities clash and constantly pound through the faade of marriage with its simmering betrayal and analogous coincidences. A lingering sense of melancholy fused with some searing and blackly comic humour (as life tends to encompass) backdrops the enigmatic lemming found in the Gettys sink pipes whose very inauspicious nature is a metaphor to the humans own emotional sandbags.

The pantomimic attempts at intrigue in the films latter half with an increased emphasis on shadowy representations leaves much to our imaginations, often leaving us alone in its translation. Ratiocinating the narrative through conventional means will lead nowhere as Moll constantly effleurages his riddle by adding on more questions than answers. Patience is indeed a virtue when it is attributed to this anticlimactic effort. It plays on different levels and added dimensions where a heuristic approach tends to tell more lies than truths. Lemming is a fine cinematic example of the nothingness of everything, the surrealistic picture of a descent into paranoia and resentment thats most engaging after the credits start to roll and Mama Cass starts to croon.

4/5