Lemming (film)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | lemming |
| Original title | lemming |
| Country of production | France |
| original language | French |
| Publishing year | 2005 |
| length | 129 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Dominik Moll |
| script |
Gilles Marchand , Dominik Moll |
| production | Michel Saint-Jean |
| music | David Whitaker |
| camera | Jean-Marc Fabre |
| cut | Mike Fromentin |
| occupation | |
| |
Lemming is a French surreal psychological thriller written by Dominik Moll . It was presented at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2005 and was released in German and Austrian cinemas in July 2006. Most of the film takes place in the Haute-Garonne department , near Toulouse . Laurent Lucas , Charlotte Gainsbourg , Charlotte Rampling and André Dussollier can be seen in the leading roles .
The film tells the story of a successful engineer who has his life under control. In the course of the film, his wife and with it his whole life slip away from him more and more.
action
Alain Getty works as an engineer at Richard Pollock in Toulouse. Alain and his wife Bénédicte invite the elder Pollock and his wife Alice to their new apartment for dinner. There Alice suddenly starts a loud argument with her husband. The Pollock marriage is obviously shattered and marked by hatred.
Later the drain in the kitchen is blocked. Alain finds a half-dead lemming in the drainpipe.
The next evening, Alice visits Alain at his workplace and tries to seduce him. He hesitates briefly, but can resist her. The next day, Alice visits Bénédicte, covertly tells her about her attempted advances and suddenly asks to be allowed to go to sleep. Alice wreaks havoc in the guest room and then shoots herself.
One day later, Alain and Pollock drive to Biarritz for an urgent official appointment. Once there, Alain calls home, but his wife is unusually harsh and cold towards him. He is irritated and drives back immediately, despite the long way and the hour at night. He falls asleep and has a car accident , but imagines that he has arrived, that he has found his wife fast asleep and the kitchen full of lemmings. He and his wife are recovering from the accident in Pollock's chalet in the mountains. There Bénédicte seduces her husband in the same way that Alice had tried before (and that although she could not know the details), this time he does not resist.
When he wakes up on the bank after having sex, his wife drove away in the car. She left him and is now having a relationship with Pollock. When he wakes up alone in the living room one evening, Bénédicte is sitting across from him, but she behaves strangely, speaks like Alice and again tells him details that only Alice could have known. It seems that Alice's ghost has taken possession of Bénédicte. Bénédicte / Alice wants to see her hated husband die, then Alain would get his Bénédicte back. She hands him the key to Pollock's otherwise well-secured property. Bénédicte / Alice advises him to make it look like a suicide.
In the evening Alain drives to Pollock and breaks into his apartment. As Alain walks past the mantelpiece, he sees pictures of young Alice there. The resemblance to his wife Bénédicte frightens him. In the bedroom, Bénédicte / Alice and Pollock sleep naked in bed. Alain Pollock suffocates with a pillow in front of his bed neighbor. He manipulates the coffee machine and turns on the gas tap on the stove. Bénédicte follows him into his car as if in a trance. They go back to their apartment in silence. When Alain later lies down next to her in bed and she wakes up, she says she had dreamed of Alice. She could no longer remember the events of the past few days. Due to the manipulations made by Alain, Pollock's house explodes and is completely destroyed. As expected, the gas explosion is interpreted as suicide.
At the end of the film it turns out that the lemming was taken to France by the boy next door from a holiday in Finland and that the angry father flushed the toilet down the toilet.
background
The film was shot in Hauts de Toulouse and Larens in the Haute-Garonne department .
In an interview on the occasion of the presentation of the film in Cannes, director and screenwriter Moll described the motif of the lemming as “the grain of sand that gets into an apparatus and throws it off balance. It is a premonition of the impending uncanny. "
The film tells the story of a successful engineer who has his life well under control and in control. In the course of the film, his wife, and with it his whole life, slips away from him more and more, in the end he finds himself a desperate murderer who wanted to win his wife back. Dream and reality often blur together. Often there are stylistic references to Alfred Hitchcock (tracking shot and large shots; the mixture between tension and humor; dealing with the subtle and subconscious) and David Lynch. The lemming, used as MacGuffin in the film, can be cited as a particularly prominent example of an allusion to Hitchcock : the more lively the lemming, the greater the problems for the Getty couple. The climax of the problems is reached shortly after Alain finds the kitchen full of lemmings: his wife leaves him and goes to Richard, whom he then kills. When the lemming is dead, he waters the flowers in the garden and his pretty young wife is with him again. The lemming drives the action forward and always creates tension for the viewer.
Reviews
- "With all references to great role models such as Hitchcock or David Lynch, Moll's carefully constructed and illuminated pictures are a little static, too well-ordered and ultimately too predictable for the cold effect to really occur with this" polar "."
- "The subject is hidden desire, but the little excursion feels like a bland museum tour of the usual psychodrama tropics - voyeurism, ghosts, sexual fantasies, dream symbolism, murder ..." ( Los Angeles Times )
- “The Franco-German director stages the intrusion of the strange and threatening into an ideal world as a nightmarish journey into the self. Every single one of the carefully composed settings is charged with meaning. Nevertheless, despite its irritatingly slow narrative pace, the film never seems clumsy. "( Der Spiegel )
- “Dominik Moll brilliantly depicts the young couple's slide into irrational worlds. Dreams and nightmares increasingly dissolve reality. But Moll's staging remains factual: the harsh sun of southern France shines relentlessly, the camera usually looks unmoved and in long shots at the needs of the protagonists. "( Welt am Sonntag )
Awards
Dominik Moll was nominated for the Golden Palm in 2005. Charlotte Rampling was nominated for the European Film Award in 2005 and for the César in 2006.
Web links
- Lemming in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- official film page (fr)
- the film at ARTE
- Lemming on Kinomorgen.de ( Society for Film and Media Criticism eV )
Individual evidence
- ↑ English press booklet with an interview with the director on the occasion of the film's release in Cannes ( Memento of the original from January 22, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 493 kB)
- ↑ Martin Rosefeldt on arte-tv.com (July 19, 2006) ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
