Posted: 08/06/2006

Lemming

(2006)

by Tom Carrao

Cold Comfort

In the opening scene of Dominik Moll’s unnerving new marital thriller, the male protagonist (an inventor of hotshot domestic technology played by a tense Laurent Lucas) is demonstrating a revolutionary mobile camera that can detect slight irregularities in household order, triggering a distress call via phone to alert an absent homeowner to possible crises. Yet another progressive device to render life ever easier and more efficient - a reassurance of catastrophe averted is the obvious selling point. And, indeed, the clients’ satisfaction at the device’s prowess seals the young designer’s place in his hierarchical aspirations-the pride of his boss, dazzling possibilities of promotion. Completely elided from the model test space is the least suggestion of human habitants, a potential for mess. The rooms are idealized tableaux of form and function. The arc of the film’s theme, of the contaminating factor of human interaction on romanticized notions of order, is embodied in the later, abject use of the camera to spy on the whereabouts of a straying wife-its become a tool in the use of primal paranoia and fear, a base reduction of a radical new medium that looks outward towards new possibilities.

Unlike the perfect dimensions of the artificial office showrooms, the young executive’s home, newly acquired in a suburban development, is a bit shabbily inchoate-a mirror stubbornly stands unmounted in a corner of the sitting room throughout the film, the scarce contents of the bookshelf flop over exhaustedly like street urchins awaiting a solid meal. Most distressingly, just before receiving the boss and his wife for dinner (a date anticipated with much trepidation by the young man and his wife as it’s caught up in the anxieties of impressing the authority figure and validating lifestyle), a lemming is discovered lodged in the curve pipe under the sink, an exotic, impossible creature in their particular region of France. It’s the first sounding note of discord, a clarion herald of more alienating foreignness to come.

A very public and savage argument erupts between the older couple just as dinner is commencing; no amount of forced civility can contain its raw ferocity. It’s unclear whether anything that elapses in the film from this point is even happening in linear time, but it’s credit to Moll’s superb control of tone and psychological rhythm that one accepts what would be monumentally absurd in lesser hands.

That the young couple’s ignorant assumptions and complacency as newlyweds is unmoored by this disquieting display is safe to say (the impact felt in its wake is helped enormously by the mordant and remorseless presence of Charlotte Rampling, who plays her stylized character as a woman who knows a good one or two things about wearying experience). The ways in which being witness to such brutality excites latent fears and emotional fault lines (Lucas’s, especially) lends the film its tightening suspense. As the young husband suffers increasingly darker bursts of sexual paranoia and hysteria, leading him to confront the existence of troubling impulses, Moll masterfully steers the story from proper time straight into, I think, the shaky psyche of the leading man, prey to very masculine vulnerabilities surrounding issues of power and control. It’s this wholesale embrace of the irrational that saves the film from becoming just a very smug tale of a man reasserting his proper mantle of the alpha male.

The film’s structure is marred only by a superfluous opening and closing narration that wants to form the material as a sort of fairy tale, the hero having endured a dark night of the soul to achieve a surer sense of self, a peace. It’s the only hollow note in a film that otherwise makes consistently bold choices of presentation.

Tom Carrao is a writer and film critic living in London.

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