Lemming (2005) (Dominik Moll)

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 Alain’s 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 film’s undisputed ace in the hole. Alice’s 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 Moll’s “Lemming” by embodying the essence of the film’s 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 Nichol’s classic 1966 meditation on adult relationships in “Who’s 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 didn’t 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.

Read the rest at: MovieXclusive.com