Lemming

Earlier this year, reviewing Michael Haneke's Hidden, I quoted the celebrated answer, both precise and enigmatic, that Harold Pinter gave 40-odd years ago when asked what his plays were about: 'The weasel under the cocktail cabinet,' he replied. Not only is Dominik Moll's admirable new thriller Lemming very close to Haneke's film (both were shown in competition at Cannes last year), it almost literally realises Pinter's image, but instead of that metaphorical mammal in the living room, there's a real lemming under the kitchen sink. Moll's last movie, the splendid Harry, He's Here to Help, was much indebted to Hitchcock, especially to Strangers on a Train. This new one seems to have been influenced by Antonioni (and possibly Pinter, Buñuel and David Lynch as well) and is altogether more complex.

Like Hidden, Lemming is about the disintegration of an apparently model marriage, a man losing control of his life, and the paranoia of surveillance. The central character, Alain Getty (played by Laurent Lucas, also the hero of Harry, He's Here to Help), is a handsome electronics engineer who has moved south to the Toulouse area with his wife of three years, Bénédicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg).

He works for a cutting-edge firm owned by Richard Pollock (André Dussollier), a suave businessman in his sixties, and his speciality is devising home automation equipment. We first see him confidently demonstrating his latest invention, a flying webcam resembling a cricket ball with helicopter rotor-blades that from miles away can be made to patrol your house. He shows how this gizmo can spot a leaking bathroom pipe in a mocked-up kitchen adjoining his laboratory. That night, when he returns to his smart new home and awaits the arrival of Pollock and his wife, Alice (Charlotte Rampling), for dinner, things start to go wrong and life in the sunny south gets colder and darker by the minute.

First, he sees a neighbour slapping his son in the street. Then there is a blockage in the sink of his real kitchen, but for all his engineering skills, he can't clear the waste pipe. The Pollocks arrive late and immediately begin rowing. The coolly neurotic Alice immediately starts talking of her husband consorting with whores and throws a glass of wine in his face. Apart from exposing the sham of her marriage, she's clearly disturbed by seeing the apparent happiness of the young couple. They evidently stir memories of a time when her own marriage was full of promise. During the night, the restless Alain again sets about fixing the blocked sink and discovers a small rodent in the pipe. A vet identifies it as a lemming and the creature comes to life. How did this rodent, notorious for its supposed suicidal bent, get from northern Scandinavia to the south of France? I shall say no more.

Moll and his co-screenwriter Gilles Marchand create a sense of unease and suspense which they maintain for more than two hours and virtually nothing in the film is without dramatic purpose. The boy being slapped in the street has a later pay-off, as does an ostensibly innocuous early reference to cooking by gas. The lemming becomes a resonant symbol for things out of place, for desperation and for suicidal tendencies.

As the movie progresses, dream and reality merge and what appear to be occult interventions could be the product of guilt and the expression of inner states. Everything in the movie comes in pairs, including two suicides (one of them faked) and everything has its mirror image. Characters swap identities as in some kind of nightmare and they often behave in an unpredictable, sometimes shocking, manner. Yet however odd things get, there's a compelling logic and nothing seems arbitrary.

The film gripped me throughout, though I fancy that people who dislike Hidden, can't take Pinter or Lynch and reject the surreal will find Lemming not exactly to their taste. No one, however, is likely to find fault with the four central performances by Lucas as the increasingly anguished engineer, Dussollier as the magnificently complacent Pollock, and Gainsbourg and Rampling as the two wives. Both Charlottes are equally at home in the French and English-speaking cinemas and were cast because director Dominik Moll recognises a certain kinship between them.