Lemming
Dominik Moll's Lemming feels like a complete throwback to the Nouvelle Vague. With the rich imagery of a Godard and the austere camera work of an Antonioni, Mr Doll presents a cogent thriller with supernatural overtones with a minimalist's avoidance of fuss. The film could be in black and white; its colors are muted and indistinct. The houses seem futuristic in a Sixties sense. The performances are understated. Only the score, by David Whitaker, is pointed to set a mood, and it consists of very unsettling music.
I was drawn, of course, by the presence in the cast of Charlotte Rampling, whose behavior in The Swimming Pool has lodged permanently in my spirit. Here, she plays Alice, the deeply hostile wife of the Richard Pollock (André Dussollier - where had I seen him before? Ah, of course - in Un coeur en hiver), the head of a high-tech firm. Alice reluctantly accompanies her husband to dinner at the home of the firm's star engineer, Alain (Laurent Lucas), and his wife of three years, Bénédicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg), and is incredibly rude. Rude the way that only Charlotte Rampling could be: with quiet, controlled malice. The young couple have no idea of how to respond, even when Alice tells them what they must be thinking. Their tension and uncertainty, which they try to shrug off, mark the beginning of a nightmare that will end only after Alain takes some spectacular risks. Risks made even more terrifying by well-founded doubt that Alain is in full control of his conscious mind.
Ms Gainsbourg plays Bénédicte as an uncertain, almost unformed woman, which opens up the possibilities tested by the story (which is attributed both to Mr Moll and to Gilles Marchand. As for Mr Lucas, I'm already looking forward to seeing him in something else. His long neck and expressive throat are key components of his facial ensemble. Alain has, so far, enjoyed a life of somewhat playful intellectual success. As the movie unwinds, Mr Lucas intensifies his character's shocked recognition that the world can be a very mysterious place. At one point, Alain is forced to walk home from a mountain cabin. This ordeal is represented in two or three scenes, all of them speechless and all of them underscoring the awful isolation that, by mischance, can befall anyone.
PS: Lemming is the title of the movie in French. The eponymous Scandinavian rodents don't seem to have inspired a word of their own.
