I teach screenplay and film analysis to college-level film students.  Since they are among the most voracious moviegoers in the world, my weekly challenge is to choose films for class study that many of them are unlikely to have already seen.  The result is a tour through cinema past and present that, I hope, introduces work that may have slipped through the cracks, but is nonetheless remarkable for a variety of reasons.  It is in this spirit that I offer this ongoing second look at some intriguing and worthwhile films well worth renting.

THIS WEEK: LEMMING (2005)

The early part of the 21^st Century has seen some mind-bending, head-scratching thrillers arriving from France.  Films like Swimming Pool and Caché, for example, probably greatly increased the conversational din in theater lobbies, as excited but perplexed audience members gathered to puzzle over what this scene meant and whether that scene did, in fact really happen at all.  Director Dominik Moll, fresh off the disturbing but rather less confounding murder mystery With a Friend Like Harry, added to the ongoing slate of French weirdo cinema in 2005 with the cerebral and intense Lemming. 

Fillmmakers who tread in surrealism, from the 1940’s experimental filmmaker Maya Deren right through to Luis Bunuel and David Lynch (the current granddaddy of “WTF?”), all face a similar challenge: they must craft a story that may well be about absolutely nothing into a genuinely thought-provoking exploration of the subconscious. And if, in doing so, the resulting tale makes us wonder if what we are really watching is simply an extended, feature-length dream (or nightmare), so much the better.  It is difficult to say how the films that are ultimately successful at strangeness pull it off; some of it, as evidenced here, is clearly in the stark compositions that somehow seem alive with impending doom; having actors that fully commit to playing it straight during a whacked out reality also helps. In the end, though, the execution of effective “otherness” is in the hands (or mind) of whatever somewhat demonic muse is guiding the person behind the camera, and such a factor is a little harder to nail down or quantify.  In any case, Moll delivers.

Laurent Lucas (Who Killed Bambi?) plays Alain Getty, a golden-boy engineer of automated devices for a high-tech firm, where his prototype flying web-cam meets with the approval of both clients and his grateful boss, Richard Pollock (André Dussollier).  Alain, already with a model suburban home and eager to advance in the company, invites Pollock to a dinner prepared by Alain’s lovely wife Bénédicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg, I’m Not There, The Science of Sleep).  Pollock shows up with his own beautiful wife Alice (Euro-legend Charlotte Rampling), and things rapidly become awkward.  Alice, still wearing sunglasses, informs her hosts of her husband’s propensity to visit whores, then throws wine in Pollock’s face.  Nor does she hold back on her contempt for Alain and Bénédicte before angrily departing.  Later that night, Alain investigates a blocked-up sink and finds a barely alive lemming wedged inside a pipe.  While Bénédicte keeps the lemming in the house and investigates where it might have come from, Alain is inexplicably approached in his laboratory by Alice, who, in a tense and unnerving scene, attempts to seduce him.  He is tempted, but begs off.  Alice then visits Bénédicte at home, ostensibly to apologize for her earlier behavior, but working her way around to a lie: she says that Alain gave in to her advances.  Now, neither we the audience, nor Bénédicte, know what to think. 

The shocking incident that follows will not be described here, lest a spoiler be thrown into the mix.  Suffice to say things take an unexpected turn.  And, after they do, Alain’s relationship to his wife becomes more and more distant and odd.  Away on a business trip with Pollock (who does, in fact, visit a prostitute), Alain is worried about Bénédicte and borrows the boss’s car to drive back home.  It appears as if he gets there, and is beset by harrowing visions of both his sleeping wife and a floor crawling with lemmings, but when he awakens he is in the hospital, where Bénédicte, now joined by Pollock, informs him that he crashed the car before he ever made it home. 

So, what is going on?  We never actually know, but we are given tantalizingly bizarre clues, which seem to point to Bénédicte becoming Alice, or is it the other way around?  And will Alain have to commit murder just to release himself from the alternate reality into which he has been plunged?  The film’s elliptical ending throws everything into even greater question, only adding to the sense that what we have just experienced could have been any number of things, or nothing at all.  Lemming is all too happy to get viewers buzzing with theories as to what it represents, or what its creepy narrative may symbolize, while at the same time it seems quite content to, yes, let us conclude that we have just spent nearly two hours watching a collection of surreal moments that may not mean anything.  The film’s great strength lies in the fact that even if we decide on the latter, we do not feel ripped off or let down. Quite the contrary; in the hands of someone who knows how to tap into the fears scratching at the edges of our dreams, nothing can be really something.