Frenchmen once did fine frisson. Once. After a partly humorous beginning that might lead to a Gallic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Lemming shifts gears and viewers might even have visions of Clouzot’s Diabolique dancing in their heads. Alas! it goes on too long, lamely brushing Willard and dozens of vague look-alike and was-it-a-dream scenarios -- catch the end-titles song -- before returning to urbanization normalcy and a voice-over explanation that leaves one death real and reasonable but suspicious. Hints abound, and scary-movie music and a bit of faint heavy breathing, but like the non-suicidal title rodent, the package is a red herring that ends up lifeless.

“A shame,” rightly says Alice (Charlotte Rampling), as for some two-thirds of its two-hour-nine-minutes, director/co-writer Dominik Moll’s movie goes as well as things go badly for blissfully wedded Alain (Laurent Lucas) and Benedicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg) Getty. Three months after the design engineer’s promotion-transfer, the couple is settling into a smart modern Bel Air house. After a “brilliant” demonstration of his newest, the MFW helicopterized video camera home troubleshooter -- titters from audience, memories of Ming the Merciless’ Flash Gordon minion -- he invites appreciative boss Richard Pollock (André Dussollier) and wife Alice to dinner.

A clogged drain delays preparation, but the meal is ready so long before the older couple’s tardy arrival that the hosts almost get it on, on the sofa. Richard apologizes and is overly jovial to compensate for sunglassed Alice’s surliness. Looking for a bathroom, she catches the young folks smooching in the kitchen, then throws wine in her husband’s face and spits out that his whoring was what delayed them. Amidst general uneasiness, the guests leave, with boss smoothing things over as best he can and inviting employee and wife to “my mountain chalet piece of heaven” on his return from business in Korea.

Alone, “the model couple can finally eat,” but a sleepless Alain descends to the kitchen and uncovers a drowned “hamster” stuck in the S-bend pipe. While he is subsequently working late at the factory, a still-spooky Alice comes looking for her absent husband but at once boldly tries her wiles on Alain while claiming hubby once tried to kill her, as evidenced by a scar, and that she has stuck around “only to see him croak.”

SPOILERS AHEAD

Aroused but deeply in love, Alain refuses, which is not what the rejected woman recounts to Benedicte when she stops by in the afternoon, trashes the guest room and blows her brains out.

Through a veterinarian (Michel Cassagne) and his scientist nephew (Jacques Bonnaffe) to whom she takes the amazingly living rodent, Benedicte learns that the creature is a Norwegian lemming -- the very noun derives from Norwegian, as well -- and absolutely unknown here in France. Upset at her husband’s not mentioning the boss' dead wife’s advances, she begins to lose her previous cool, so bewildering Alain that dream and reality merge and, the result of what is explained as a blackout, he drives into a motorway abutment.

So far so good, but at the boss’ solitary mountain retreat, Benedicte appears to become Alice, or vice versa, and even repeats the other’s intimate words verbatim. Here is where it unravels. Instead of a Martha-George-Honey-Nick confrontation of secrets and passions, we get some sort of murder-revenge thing fueled possibly by yet another tired tale of possession or, alternatively, by Benedicte’s psychological identification with her spouse’s presumed perfumed seducer. The hokey flying spy device whirrs into action again, a laughable “system failure” conveniently aiding grainy images in confusing the two women, and us.

Earlier interest flagged a while back, so it does not much matter whose body (if any) is frolicking with Pollock. One of the two wives -- yes -- proposes a plan. It succeeds, and suburban subdivision Saturday morning voice-over assures us that all is now well and offers sunlight explanations. But imagined extra rodents are left hanging, and a second suicide is real while a pregnancy might be a point of conjecture if the viewer has not already given up.

(Released by Strand Releasing; not rated by MPAA.)