Dominik Moll, director of Harry, He's Here to Help, makes his return to the screen with Lemming. Carol Murphy talks to him about the film, and finds out how a lemming can become a red herring.

In a seated area behind a glass fronted studio representation of an ideal home, Alain (Laurent Lucas) smugly shows a group of potential corporate buyers how we can keep our home from harm, erosion, and entropy while we are en vacances. Alain controls a digital flying device that can fix any minor domestic mishap. As this digital creature locates and fixes a burst pipe, Alain's boss, Richard Pollock (André Dussollier), watches with paternal pride, and then invites himself and his wife Alice (Charlotte Rampling) over to Alain's house for dinner.

At home Alain's life with his young wife Bénédicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is as happy, controlled, and anodyne as his work life. Just the way he likes it. Then the sink gets blocked and Alain finds a small creature in the U-bend pipe underneath. Couple this with Richard and Alice's self-destructively late arrival for dinner: Alice turns up like the grim reaper, and with her blackly shaded gloom she brings a strange sense of comic foreboding into the banality of the younger couple's lives. Alice is a supernatural catalyst who, through a series of events including suicide, tests the simplistic moral parameters of married life. She thrusts immorality onto the life of Alain and makes a slow invasive attack on the personality of Bénédicte.

Carol: Where did the idea for Lemming come from?

Dominik: From lemmings. I have been fascinated by lemmings since I was a child. I grew up in Germany where the mass migrations and supposed collective suicides of this small rodent are a well-known phenomenon. The starting point for the story was the image of a man unscrewing the joints of a blocked sink, noticing something, tugging on it, and finding himself clutching a lemming. Naturally the question arises: How did it get there? – for these characters inhabit only the northernmost parts of Scandinavia.

The basic idea was to start with an ordinary event drawn from everyday life – like a blocked sink – and make this the start of a long voyage through troubled waters, including various episodes of the unreal. I also wanted a central character who appeared to be in total control of his professional and emotional life, who thought control was an essential requirement for happiness. And I wanted to watch him gradually fall apart.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 110.