I wanted to review the Dominik Moll film, Lemming, this week. No matter how hard I struggled, I couldn’t make it interesting. Here is how far I got:
Dominik Moll, the German-born French filmmaker, scored a hit with the creepy thriller Harry, He's Here To Help. His new film, Lemming, which played the Cannes Film Festival in 2005, is just now getting released.
It has a promising start. A nice, young couple named Alain and Benedicte Getty live in a nice suburban house in southern France. Alain has a neat job. He designs computer gadgets. His latest invention is a remote-controlled Webcam which flies around like a little helicopter. One night, he invites his boss, Andre Dussolier, over for dinner.
Creepiness sets in first when the plumbing backs up. The dinner party turns into a disaster when the boss’s wife Alice, played wonderfully by Charlotte Rampling, refuses to take off her sunglasses. She belittles and then throws a glass of wine in her husband’s face.
The next day, Alice turns up at Alain’s lab and comes onto him. In the meantime, Alain’s cute housewife, played by the charming Charlotte Gainsbourg, calls in the plumber and discovers the pipes are blocked by a lemming who migrated to south of France from Norway and got stuck in the pipe. Very soon, Rampling turns up at Alain and Benedicte’s idyllic suburban house, feigns illness and ends up in their spare bedroom where she shoots herself in the head.
The plot just got started. Eventually, the film veers off into possession and the paranormal. There is nothing too original here, because the basis of Lemming is a formula—the all-too-innocent couple done in by evil—but instead of playing with the formula, somewhere along the line Moll decided he wanted to be a “serious” director.
That’s where I stopped and then got depressed. What’s WRONG with LEMMING?
Perhaps the director, Moll, heady from the success of Harry, got lost, or overreached, overwrote, wanted too much to succeed in an even bigger, grander way. Maybe he wasn’t happy having a film bought by Miramax, which Harry was, having a commercial success, and wanted to be appreciated as an artist, a new Antonioni.
Who knows?
The point is, he lost his sense of humor, became too serious about himself. In the process, he made a film which is at least partially a poor man’s copy of Francois Ozon, his French filmmaker-colleague, whose Sitcom is fresher, less expensive and more subversive than the studied anarchy of Lemming.
Isn’t that the condition of most films and filmmaker today? What’s happened to Woody Allen when he could work for a few feet of celluloid and poking fun at himself and his neurosis rather than creating films which are Euro-pudding star-studded productions so calculated that their arithmetic shows?
What’s happened to the days when Roger Corman or George Romero could supply us with a few tingles of spine-tingling horror which managed to be scary AND cheesy at the same time, and which you could see at a packed midnight show for a dollar?
Take a look at the difference—and the degree of freshness—in films like Terrence Malick’s Badlands and his over-burdened The New World, or Spike Lee’s irreverent She's Gotta Have It and his recent Inside Man or 25th Hour?
The more I think about it, the more I despise and hate films like Amelie for all the pretentious, manipulative, frenetic nonsense thrown into a single film—with that idiotic slap-happy smile of Audrey Tautou—and with all that money.
Here’s my recipe for the day: take away their star actors. Ban all celebrity shows, magazines and Websites. Take away their money. Give them a high-definition camera and $100,000. Tell them to make a film.
I can’t wait for the exciting results.
If, on the other hand, audiences want to be lemmings, who is to stop them from migrating or from getting stuck in the plumbing?
This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview.
Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.
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