- guardian.co.uk, Thursday May 12 2005 15.36 BST
Lemming, directed and co-written by Dominik Moll, is an elegant French suspense thriller with a batsqueak of the supernatural, influenced by Hitchcock and Chabrol. It has the same touches of the scabrous and the bizarre that were to be found in Moll's debut movie, Harry Is Here To Help.
Laurent Lucas and Charlotte Gainsbourg are Alain and Benedicte: a modern, affluent couple. Alain is a hi-tech software engineer and the rising star in his firm, who has devised a remote-control "flying webcam" which can buzz around your house while you're away, spotting problems with the plumbing etc and transmitting pictures to your laptop or mobile. Moll has a bravura tongue-in-cheek opening sequence in which this preposterous Mission Impossible-style gadget is demonstrated.
But Alain is worried. His boss Richard Pollock and Pollock's formidable and difficult wife, Alice, are coming to dinner and he is keen to make a good impression; they are played by André Dussollier and Rampling. Alice discomfits her hosts by wearing dark glasses throughout the evening and finally astonishes and embarrasses them with a ferocious outburst, accusing her husband of "consorting with whores". With her seduc tive, mesmeric gaze, Alice is to be a dark and devastating force within Alain and Benedicte's own marriage and her arrival coincides with something even more worrying.
The sink in the couple's new kitchen is blocked by a lemming - a rodent mythically supposed to be suicidal. It is a sinister omen, hinting that their sleek bourgeois contentment is to be infested by self-destructive impulses.
Violence and paranoia coexist with black comedy in Moll's disquieting tale. He and co-writer Gilles Marchand are very good at hooking the audience into a strange world in which things are not as they should be.
The movie mixes the ridiculous and the macabre and uses the resulting fume of unreality to create something enjoyably hallucinatory. Lucas, as in Moll's first movie, nicely plays the fear-stricken young professional and Rampling is menacing as only she can be.
The movie is a little contrived and overlong at just over two hours, losing some of its focus and intensity, but this was a well-crafted movie which delivered a pleasing frisson to the Cannes opening night.
