CineScene--By and For Movie Lovers

Darkness on the edge of town
by Chris Dashiell

The problems of kids have almost always been dismissed or distorted in the movies, usually with condescending humor or pat solutions. In a market dominated by appeals to a youthful demographic, this is more the case than ever. Among the factors here is a kind of squeamishness about depicting the suffering of children--our notions of childhood innocence can make such themes seem too painful for drama, unless they're sweetened with happy endings or other forms of uplift.

Michael Cuesta's new film, Twelve and Holding, has a healthy respect for the seriousness of a kid's inner life. The story concerns three 12-year-olds in a New Jersey suburb. First there's Jake (Conor Donovan), who's devastated when his twin brother Rudy is killed after some older kids torch their tree house, not knowing that anyone was in it. His shyness accentuated by a birthmark that covers half his face, Jake feels guilty that he wasn't there to save his brother when the tragedy happened, and to make matters worse, it seems like his parents favored his confident outgoing brother over him. Jake's friend Malee (Zoe Weizenbaum) thinks that her mother (Annabella Sciorra), a psychiatrist, drove her father away, and as the girl begins puberty, she develops a hopeless obsession for a hunky construction worker (Jeremy Renner) who happens to be one of her mother's patients. Another friend, Leonard (Jesse Camacho), morose and overweight, loses his sense of taste when he suffers a head injury escaping from the burning tree house. His ensuing lack of appetite leads to a passion for losing weight that puts him at odds with his obese parents.

It's a lot of story to fit into an hour-and-a-half movie, and although this is a good kind of problem to have, Anthony Cipriano's screenplay stretches itself a little thin trying to cover all the bases. It also indulges in some implausible events for the sake of humor in the case of Leonard's story. Well, the story is funny, and in an intelligent way too, but this is the one aspect of the film that feels too schematic, like an after-school special.

The director, however, displays a talent for bringing out the best in his young actors, and the film has a special feeling for the mutability and depth of kids' emotions. The performance of Donovan is remarkably passionate and well-rounded, and Weizenbaum's portrayal of her character's precocious attempts at adult romance is heart-rending.

A common element among the parents is an inability to connect with and understand the inner reality of their children. Cuesta reverses the usual perspective, observing the parents as almost alien in their concerns. But the ties that bind parent and child can have unforeseen consequences. Jake's mother, played by Jayne Atkinson, responds to her grief with bitter expressions of vengeance against the boys who killed her son, not realizing how her rage is planting the seeds of discontent in her surviving child. From here the story takes an unusual turn, eventually bringing us to a place of truth far darker than we might have expected. Cuesta's sophomore effort may lack some heft, but it's a fairly involving and dramatic portrait of kids in crisis.

There's nothing very new about the theme of Dominik Moll's Lemming. The happy life of a young affluent couple is undermined through the influence of an older, more sinister pair. What pleasure there is comes from the ways Moll and his co-screenwriter Gilles Marchand infuse elements of supernatural horror into the story.

Alain (Laurent Lucas), a bright up-and-comer at a high-tech home security firm, lives in a posh suburb with his sexy, playful wife Bénédicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg). One evening, his corporate boss Richard (André Dussolier) comes to dinner, accompanied by his wife Alice (Charlotte Rampling). Alice wears shades at the dinner table, and behaves very rudely, accusing her husband of infidelity in front of their hosts, throwing a glass of wine in his face, and when they leave, insulting Bénédicte.

Later that night, things get really bizarre when Alain, fixing the stopped-up kitchen sink, discovers a half-dead lemming clogging the drain pipe. The grotesque and inexplicable appearance of this rodent that normally only appears in Scandinavia (as Bénédicte is informed when she takes the animal to the vet) is followed by an attempt by Alice to seduce Alain after hours at his office. From there we proceed to suicide, madness, and murder.

The film exudes an atmosphere of disturbing violations and unnamable psychic rot, amplified by the weird symbolism of the lemming, like an impenetrable dream element that keeps returning to haunt us. Yet the picture is at times quite amusing, especially in its first half--one of the main jokes being that Alain is so unwilling to offend his boss that he keeps acting as if everything's fine in the face of the absurdly escalating insanity of Richard and Alice's behavior. Indeed, Lucas's performance really makes the movie. His character gradually cracks, not through horror-movie histrionics, but with a sort of quiet implosion.

Lemming is burdened with one of the most grating musical scores in recent memory (David Whitaker is the culprit), and the hinge on which the plot hangs is a flimsy one. The film's main thrust is bitter and misanthropic--married love is an illusion that evaporates with the inevitable exhaustion of time. A few hours after seeing the movie you might think 'So what?' but at the time the tension is undeniably enjoyable. If nothing else, the picture proves that vague dread and uneasiness can be entertaining.