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).