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Dominik Moll's second feature concerns a happily married couple whose seemingly idyllic existence is suddenly undermined by unwelcome discoveries - not least a sink blockage caused by the Scandinavian rodent of the title. More pertinently, Alain and Bénédicte Getty become part of a Machiavellian game being played out by Alain's boss Pollock and his wife, as a dinner party that would make even Ricky Gervais cringe is followed in quick succession by an attempted seduction, an unwelcome visit and a shockingly sudden suicide. Up to this point, Moll has been following in Hitchcock, Chabrol and Clouzot's footsteps, but then Alain's guilt flips the narrative into far more intriguing territory as he finds that he can't even trust his own memory of events. If this description sounds annoyingly vague, that's purely to avoid spoilers - not least among Lemming's many pleasures is the way Moll and co-writer Gilles Marchand turn a set of wildly disparate plot elements into a coherent and convincing whole (even the lemming itself has a rational explanation). Of the central quartet, Laurent Lucas reprises his bewildered husband from Moll's earlier Harry, He's Here To Help, but with added psychological shading, the veteran André Dussolier flawlessly combines urbane professionalism and absolute moral rot, while the Anglo-French duo of Charlottes Rampling and Gainsbourg make a terrifying double act as women scorned. As an accident of timing, this DVD has also become a tribute to the recently late György Ligeti, whose dementedly mechanistic keyboard piece 'Continuum' is unexpectedly pressed into service to accompany an eleventh-hour murder.

 

Michael Brooke on 15th August 2006
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