Chaos theory

A model couple, Alain and Bénédicte, live a perfect life in a clean white suburban house.

A model couple, Alain (Laurent Lucas) and Bénédicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg), live a perfect life in a clean white suburban house. Alain is an engineer who is developing a way of protecting the home by remote control, using a minute helicopter which carries a camera and can download its images on to a laptop. Even from afar, Alain tells his audience during a presentation, you can limit damage to your home. Alain and Bénédicte invite Alain’s boss Richard Pollock (André Dussollier) and his wife Alice (Charlotte Rampling) to dinner, and as Bénédicte washes the salad she notices the kitchen sink is blocked. After the dinner party ends in spilt wine and accusations between the Pollocks, Alain unscrews the drain and finds a lemming half-drowned in the pipe. He thinks, mistakenly, that he has solved the problem (‘I unblocked the sink,’ he tells Benedicte proudly as he kisses her in bed). But the lemming signifies the arrival of chaos: soon Alain’s ordered home is ransacked; his ordered mind is confounded.

To be at all a success, the film requires the audience to be in patient and sympathetic mood. It would be easy — and not an outrageous slander — to call Lemming pretentious, slow, baffling or even ridiculous. But its qualities are the same as its flaws — what intrigues at the start begins to grate towards the finish. It is undoubtedly too slow, but interesting nonetheless. Like Mulholland Drive or Vertigo, it has a dreamlike (or nightmarish) atmosphere and an irrational narrative (every prediction I made was wrong) which could either mystify or madden its audience.

Of course, the overall intention is well signalled. Such a controlled environment as Alain’s is just begging to be dishevelled, and there is nothing new about a film which peers between suburban shutters.