LEMMING - Another day, another disappointing movie

It seems like all I watch these days are film that are not so much bad as disappointing. From X-MEN 3 to THE KING, I watch films with actors, directors and production teams that I admire, but which fail to engage or excite. Today's offering is a French supernatural revenge thriller called LEMMING. The movie is a four-hand piece set in contemporary France. We are introduced to a young couple called Alain and Benedicte Getty. They are a "model couple" living in a nice suburb. The husband works for a high-tech company that makes fancy kit for monitoring one's own house - little flying webcams to spot leaks and such. He finds a lemming in the drain. This being a moody French film, that is a Significant Fact. Alain and Benedicte become entangled with Alain's oleagnious, whoremongering boss Richard, and his veangeful wife, Alice. The film unfurls at length into a supernatural thriller which I found dull, dull, dull. It was never spooky, never scary. Neither the script nor the camerawork created any tension or paranoia. The symbolism - spy-cams and suicidal lemmings - was hamfisted. The nightmare scene elicited unintended laughter. As for the ending, we are given an attempt at a tantalising enigma. But it is not a par with the final frames of that outstanding movie, HIDDEN/CACHE. The film fails badly and this is all the more pitiful considering that is directed by French wunderkind, Dominik Moll, and stars four great actors. Alain is played by Laurent Lucas - the actor who played cabaret-singer Marc Stevens in the superb Belgian horror flick, CALVAIRE. His wife Benedicte is played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, who played JANE EYRE in the outstanding Zeffirelli production and also featured in 21 GRAMS. Andre Dusollier plays the lecherous old Pollock - an actor I'll always remember for his similarly creepy performance in UN COEUR EN HIVER. Finally, the iconic Charlotte Rampling plays his veangeful wife, Alice. What a waste.

LEMMING opened Cannes 2005. It is at the fag-end of its super-limited UK release and at the start of a limited US release. It opens in Germany on July 13th 2006. I do not know of an Austrian or Australian release date.

CALVAIRE - Makes HOSTEL looks like Snoopy

CALVAIRE/THE ORDEAL is a genre movie that satisfies. In 90 minutes, the director, Fabrice du Welz, creates an atmosphere at first blackly comic, then slightly unnerving, then sinister and finally horrific. Marc Stevens is a cabaret singer who dresses in a sparkly cape and pays meticulous attention to his make-up. We meet him as he travels around the Belgian countryside performing in front of a nursing home full of desiccated, frustrated grannies. The director allows us to see Marc perform a full song, filmed in a single shot. Perhaps we are meant to laugh at his corny routine, but it is clear that Marc is happy in his calling. He will later cling to this when all around him is spinning out of control: “My name is Marc Stevens. I am a singer of love songs.” On the way to his next gig, Marc’s van breaks down in the back-woods of Belgium. He is taken by a vaguely sinister, yet seemingly harmless hillbilly who is searching for his lost and beloved dog to stay with another vaguely sinister and yet seemingly harmless hillbilly who has a room to spare. Increasingly nervous at the obstacles involved in getting his van repaired and embarrassed by the way in which the woodsman, Bartel, has befriended him, Marc obliges him by singing a tender love song. This song triggers something in Bartel, and he is reminded of his wife, who left him for another man. Bad things happen. This film completely creeped me out, despite the relatively restrained use of blood and gore because it created a sense of inevitability and claustrophobia. In HOSTEL, while bad things happen at the hands of psychopaths, the fate of the protagonist is ultimately in the hands of rational but ruthless people who can be appealed to, or outwitted, or paid off. By contrast, in CALVAIRE, there is no hope. Bad things happen not just because the protagonist is held hostage by a delusional hillbilly, but because the entire community is unhinged. There is no way out. There is no reason. And that, to me at least, is utterly horrifying.

CALVAIRE is available on DVD.