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LEMMING
Directed by: Dominik Moll.
Produced by: Michel Saint-Jean.
Written by: Dominik Moll & Gilles Marchand.
Director of Photography: Jean-Marc Fabre.
Edited by: Mike Fromentin.
Music by: David Sinclair Whitaker.
Released by: Strand.
Language: French with English subtitles.
Country of Origin: France. 129 min. Not Rated.
With: Laurent Lucas, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Charlotte Rampling & André Dussollier.

Set in a new suburban hillside development that could easily be in the Spielberg burgs of the San Fernando Valley, a young attractive married couple have just moved into the Southern French enclave Bel Air. Alain Getty (Laurent Lucas) is the breadwinner, Benedicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg) the homemaker. The only thing marring their sleek surroundings is the kitchen sink, which is strangely clogged. Married for three years, they’re still so much in love they almost make love right before the arrival of their dinner guests, Alain’s boss and his wife.

Despite the younger couple’s best efforts, this will be a bumpy night. First, the guests arrive late, and when they do arrive, Alice (Charlotte Rampling) never removes her sunglasses, but her gloves certainly come off. The evening shifts from awkward to disastrous as Alice briskly informs her hosts that she and husband Richard (the smooth André Dussollier) were late because he was with his whores. Richard remains cool as a cucumber, even after his wife has thrown a glass of red wine in his face. The dinner is understandably cut short, but not before Alice turns to Benedicte, and like a witch out of a Grimm fairy tale, calls her pathetic. It might as well be a curse. From then on the “model” couple’s marriage unravels in a surreal game of conjugal reconfiguration.

To reveal too much wouldn’t just deflate the carefully calibrated suspense, but would take away from the film’s unpredictable and breezy turns. Only the symbolism of the suicidal Scandinavian rodent caught in the Getty’s plumbing (hence the title) will be obvious. A high-tech 21st century variation of Rear Window might be a Hitchcockian touch, but Lemming has more in common with Cédric Kahn’s terror-in-the-daylight drama Red Lights, which was cowritten by Lemming’s Gilles Marchand. Like that noirish film, the question of when the nightmare begins and ends is left up to the viewer.

This follow-up to director Dominik Moll’s With a Friend Like Harry shares a similar sense of black humor, but Lemming’s quartet is more in-sync. (Sergio López high-energy performance in Friend almost hijacked the film from his fellow actors.) However, the willowy Rampling does tower over everyone, literally and figuratively. While everyone else underplays their roles, she’s like a blast of oven heat. Her mouth has never been as taut or fixed. Although her and Gainsbourg’s roles could be seen as two interchangeable depictions of women as harpies, that would be to read too much into this well-made genre-bending diversion that goes well with popcorn as well as champagne. Kent Turner
May 19, 2006