Product Description

A chillingly suspenseful psychological thriller with a wicked dose of black humour, 'Lemming' stars Laurent Lucas as Alain, a successful webcam engineer happily married to Benedicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg). When he invites his boss (Andre Dussollier) and his wife Alice (Charlotte Rampling) to dinner, Alain finds the evening abruptly cut short when a barely suppressed resentment between his guests suddenly boils to the surface and a furious Alice storms out. This disastrous social engagement and the subsequent discovery of a rodent, unaccountably stuck in the waste pipe of the young couple s kitchen sink, marks the beginning of a strange, unsettling and sometimes shocking chain of events that disrupts their orderly life and leaves Alain questioning his own sanity.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17063 in DVD
• Released on: 2006-08-21
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Formats: PAL, Widescreen
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 129 minutes

Synopsis
A well-off couple experiences turbulence in their relationship following a small dinner gathering. After they invite one of their bosses (and his wife) over for a dinner, events unfold into utter chaos, turning the couple's otherwise normal life into one filled with murder, seduction, and lies.

From The Studio
Alain (Laurent Lucas) seems to have it all--a beautiful wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a perfect home and a prestigious new engineering job. But the unexpected sexual attentions of his boss' disconcertingly glacial wife (Charlotte Rampling) and the discovery of a rodent, unaccountably stuck in the waste pipe of his kitchen sink, spark the beginning of a strange, unsettling and sometimes shocking chain of events that disrupts Alain's orderly life and leaves him questioning his own sanity. Featuring a masterfully unnerving performance from Charlotte Rampling the new film from director Dominik Moll (Harry, He's Here To Help) is a chillingly suspensful and darkly comic psychological thriller.

Customer Reviews

We need a stronger key motivator, I think, but at least we learn about lemmings
Lemming starts promisingly with the dinner party from hell. A young, much in love couple is preparing dinner for their guests, his boss and the boss' wife. Alain Getty (Laurent Lucas) is the newly hired home automation designer at The Pollack Company. He's smart, decent and good-looking. His wife, Benedicte, is alert, pretty and bright. She cooks. He tastes. They smooch. Then their guests show up. His boss, Richard Pollack (Andre Dussollier), is older, gracious and friendly. Alice Pollack (Charlotte Rampling), grim and puffy-eyed, is something else, from the sunglasses she wears at table to the glass of wine she throws in her husband's face. In between, the young couple hears her accusations of his infidelity. She trains her venom on the young wife as she leaves. On top of all this, the kitchen sink's drain is stopped up with what we later find is a lemming.

So far, so good.

But if we were expecting the clever, unnerving suspense of director Dominik Moll's With A Friend Like Harry from 2000, we're going to be not only disappointed but also surprised at Moll's miscues. The blame must be shared with his co-writer, Gilles Marchand. There simply are no motivations or situations that arise other than what, over and over, Moll and Marchand create out of thin air for us. That is, of course what the movies are all about. But with A Friend Like Harry, all we had to do was accept one unlikely situation...that there might be someone lurking about like Harry. Once we swallowed that hook, we were caught. With that accepted, everything else Moll threw at us was accepted, however unlikely or extreme. With Lemming, there's no first cause that makes sense or is believable. The hook we have to swallow is that Alain's hormone's will respond to the aging stimulus of Mrs. Pollack's unsmiling attempt at seduction, and that Alain's involuntary and momentary arousal makes him just as guilty as if he'd agreed to jump in the sack with her. Alain doesn't agree to do that, regardless of how a few hormones responded, because he honorably loves his wife. Moll needs a motivating cause for what he has in store for us. This isn't believable enough, but Moll doesn't seem to notice. He gives us a director's indulgence. Consequently, everything that follows is a director's indulgence, too.

The first 46 minutes of Lemming, even if not especially engaging, have a nice uneasiness about them, culminating in a genuinely unexpected action. From then on, however, I was never especially engaged in the creepy shenanigans of isolated cabins, dreams, waves of rodents, adultery, the Mini Flying Webcam, hints of the Exorcist, murder and even the origin of lemmus lemmus and how one got stuck in a drain in the south of France. All seemed to be manipulations of a director who, this time, might not have been as smart as he thought he was.

If Moll with his lemming wants to deal in metaphors, perhaps our metaphor should be the last thing we hear...Mama Cass and the rest of the Mamas and the Papas singing Dream a Little Dream of Me. It's a great song but we have it pasted a little pretentiously onto the end of a French psycho thriller. As hard as this is to say, Mama Cass doesn't exactly swing it.

A very odd, unexpected and very enjoyable thriller
This film exemplifies everything I love about French cinema - in spite of the fact that the director is not French at all.

Unpredictable, un-formulaic and downright odd in places, I found it hugely enjoyable. Add to that the perfect casting, great camera work and a sense that nobody is taking themselves too seriously, all in all, this is an unusual and challenging treat.

Strange & suspenseful
Thoroughly enjoyed this bizarre little thriller. Refreshing to watch a film where silence is used so effectively by the Director.
In particular, the dinner party from hell scene was squirmingly wonderful!